Been a while since I’ve shopped for one of these. I remember the one from my childhood like it was yesterday. So amazing to have a cool room in humid climates. Now we need another one and Consumer Reports (Subscription required) is a good resource as it a quick check of Amazon ratings which shows people liking the low cost Frigidaire units, although CR says they are noisy. Probably a good value.
But in looking at it, you need about 30 BTU per square foot, so a 200 square foot room needs about 6000 BTU roughly. And the larger the unit the harder to manage, so don’t just the biggest one you can find. So for a small one which is 5-6.5KBTU:
There are blizzard of GE models which all have different ratings and different channels. It is so confusing! but they really dominate the ratings:
- GE AEM05LS. This is the top rated one
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GE AEM06LS Series. These three are just slightly lower and have the same ratings, the AEH06LS (Sam’s Club) and the AEL06Ls (Home Depot). About $180
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GE AEM06LT is rated lower for some reason
So for the medium sized which are 7K-8.5K BTU, here are some of the good choices:
- GE AEM-08LT. These are actually pretty hard to find and the ending numbers matter. Note also that the AEL-08 is a specific Lowes model and is rated much lower.
LG LW8014-ER. At least this model has a consistent number everywhere. It is about $300 on Amazon and $240 at Home Depot, so for once the local guys win. You can get it delivered to a store and pick it up or there is free home delivery.
So how to save a little more, well deploy the triple dip scheme:
- Cashbackrewards.com says that there is 6% from toipcashback for the next two days and long term a 4% rebate using savingstar.com from homedepot.com and they are doing 2 points per dollar at Alaska (tempting worth 1.8 cents a mile!). Note that if are using Javascript block on savingstar, you need to enable the rewardaccelerator.com or you won’t see any online rewards
