AC-Reviews.com

Costco is one of the most popular places to buy appliances, home goods, and food. Portable ACs is popular with young couples and students, as well as older folks in homes that may not have the latest state-of-the-art air conditioning installed. Some apartment homes have old AC units or none at all, which creates a need for alternative, cheap cooling.

Costco offers an array of different units. Haier is a brand of portable ACs that is familiar to AC reviewers and those in the AC business. Their units are typically solid but the quality of build has been an issue to some customers. Costco offers the Haier CPN10XC9 at under $300. Many reviewers, including myself, share the view that this unit may not be user friendly. My friend purchased this Haier a few days ago, and this is what he essentially wrote to me:

“Really noisy, and installation can be bothersome. Had to call Haier customer service and they weren’t as helpful as I hoped. Couldn’t sleep with the unit on so we suffered a few nights before we just got used to the heat. Good price for the unit though, but I really think I could’ve saved more elsewhere. It didn’t seem to cool the room much, though.”

After researching their problems I realized that they did not properly exhaust the unit outside the window. In truth, for some reason they totally forgot about it! If you are not sure of how to properly vent their portable AC, you can watch a video on YouTube here.

Once my friend properly ventilated his unit, he was much more pleased at its performance. It was still noisy according to his tastes, but he was now able to sleep a but more soundly. I would recommend the CPN10XC9 as a “quick buy”, but there are many more resources other than customer reviews that can help you decide which AC to purchase. Buying a $300 appliance takes a lot of research and contemplation, as your comfort is often the most important thing during hot days!

My girlfriend has a smallish apartment that, for some reason or another, was designed to face the sunrise. She loves the sunshine but constantly keeps the blinds closed in fear that it’ll heat up her studio home. During the summers, as I found last year, it gets hot, really hot. It doesn’t help to add that she lives in the Inland Empire, away from my comfortable Orange County tastes, and her apartment complex doesn’t offer the conventional central AC that I’m used to. I spent many weekends with her in hot sweltering heat…and my only condolence was to go to the public pool.

Since her apartment was already small, we wanted to purchase something that would compliment her living space. Other portable AC units are pretty huge and the footprint is often sizable. We went to Target online and had a Haier CPRB07XC7 shipped to us. Unfortunately, the Haier unit requires a working remote to program and it wasn’t working right out of the bat. We made a trip to Target that day to inform them of the non-working unit, and we went through a pretty extensive process to get what we needed: a working AC unit…which we needed out of the box!

30 days later we received the new remote, and finally put the CPRB07XC7 to use. Although it’s a nice unit, I found that the 30-day wait was really unecessary. On the Target online store, I’ve read that many other customers have had the same problem with the remote…and at first I thought that it was just one of those things that “wouldn’t happen to me”. Perhaps Haier should rethink a remote-less design for convenience! Thankfully, it’s still working as of today. Just hope the remote doesn’t break again.

I have heard that nowadays they ship the unit with two remotes…who ships any appliance with two remotes? Must be a very dire sign that even the company doesn’t have much confidence in their product…