Small Air Conditioning Unit For Home Gym

cherylsurrey

The air conditioning unit I use to cool my home gym died last night, and I am looking to get a new one, it's a tiny room of about 6 square meters, I don't want a huge machine, but something compact, can any one recommend a model or advise as to whether one of the two below would work, to make the room really cold.




http://www.airconcentre.co.uk/symphony+diet+8i+evaporative+air+cooler/1758452287


http://www.appliancesdirect.co.uk/p/aircube/electriq-aircube-air-conditioner

SomeJoeNamedBob

The first product won't really make much more difference than a regular fan (I've tried these). The second is a proper air conditioning unit which according to the specs will cool a room of up to 10 square meters, so easily capable of what you want.

However, being a portable internal unit it has 2 issues. One is that it will be quite noisy, though that may not be an issue in a gym. The second is that you need to vent the warm, moist air to the outside without your cool air also escaping and/or warm air getting back in. Dangling the vent hose out of an open window won't work very well unless you can also find some way to seal up the rest of the window gap - drawing heavy curtains across the hose/open window can help.

What sort of air conditioner was your previous, now broken, one?

cherylsurrey

the one that died was a Matsui one and lasted 6 years, it was noisy but not a problem while I am working out, I used to put the vent hose out of the window, I have heavy curtains that draped over it, so it worked well.


Looking online though it seems that I need something with over 10,000BTU, to really work cooling the room, the old one didn't get it cold enough, so have my eye on one in the £350 pound range now.

SomeJoeNamedBob

Don't suppose you've opened the old one up to see what kind of state its in? I had one that stopped blowing cold air after many years and turned out it was because the internal cooling fins were completely gunked up.

The purpose of these is to dissipate heat, but if they are covered in a blanket of dust thick enough to form a thermal blanket they understandably don't work so well and the unit then shuts down the compressor. I pulled/hoovered off the accumulated internal fluff and it sparked back into life.

If it's already not working you don't have much to lose, but be careful 'cos if you do get it working again you'll want to be able to put it all back together again neatly.