Excellent cooling, extremely quiet, sleek design

After reading reviews here and other online sites, I chose this Sharp portable AC over Soleus or Delonghi. I brought it home the first day of a 100 degree heat wave (in CA) and got it set up in 15 minutes. It is heavy so I required help to get it into and out of the car, but the crate was easy to unpack because once the plastic ties are removed, the top of the box slides off and you simply roll the unit off the box bottom. The casters roll easily even over the threshold, I had no problems positioning it where I wanted it. The unit looks very sleek and blends into the room.

Getting the window frame adapter installed took about 10 minutes. After that, it was simply snap on the hose on both ends, plug in and turn on! The store advised we wait 1-2 hours after transporting to start the unit, since tilting it could disturb the coolant.

Our little house is a cottage and very poorly insulated, single pane windows and probably just newspaper in the walls. With this unit running, our 500 square foot house dropped from 90 degrees to 75 degrees in a few hours on mega cool. The unit pumps out a lot of air when the fan is on high, and it is VERY quiet! You can hear swishing air, but the compressor is unbelievably quiet. Compared to our old in window AC we were not even sure if this thing was running at first (other than the fan).

We've had it going for 4 days now and it is keeping even our poorly-insulated house pleasantly cool with external temps above 95 degrees. We installed the unit on the sunny side of the house but since this unit exhausts hot air but pulls the intake air from your house it doesn't seem to affect performance if it is installed on the sunny side of the house. I also consider this a more efficient design, since the air inside the house will be cooler after some time running, so you are recycling the cooled air rather than drawing in hotter air from outside.

We plan to wrap the hose with insulation (sold for air ducts) to make the unit even more efficient. The hose is long enough that we have the unit about 3' to the right of our window and the hose reaches fine. If you needed to place it further away, you could easily extend the hose with a dryer exhaust hose sold at hardware stores. The hose rises straight up out the back of the unit so it can be pushed back right up to the wall.

The remote is easy to use.

Overall, this is an excellent if expensive unit, and quiet enough to leave running while we sleep.