Air Conditioners for Dummies

Our staffers here at the Antisocial Network tend to be rather unforgiving of freelancers who prattle on about topics for which they have no training and no experience. Unfortunately, some of them are quite prolific. Today's DotD nominee is one such character a freelancer who boasts that she has "more than 4,000 publishing credits." If, however, others of them are as useless as this SFGate.com article – "Can You Hook Up an AC Unit Without a Window?" – then Michelle Miley has been a significant contributor to the stupidification of the internet.

Of course, part of the problem lies with the OQ, since the question is at its core pretty ambiguous. For one, we don't know of many rooms that have no windows that are habitable, or at least habitable enough to need HVAC. For another, you have to wonder what the OQ meant by "without a window": a windowless room, a room that has no suitable windows, or there's an ordinary room with windows but the OQ doesn't want to block the windows. Whatever.  But what the hey, we'll run with it...

Miley could apparently think of only one solution, and that's to spring for a portable air conditioner. Of course, a portable A/C unit still needs someplace to discharge the warm air (and, for that matter, moisture), so most of them are designed to vent through... you guessed it: a window. Michelle, however, decided that a window's not necessary, for "...portable air conditioners need to vent warm air and water to the outside. They do this via one or two hoses, depending on the unit. These hoses must be run to a door or vented through an outside wall for ventilation..."

Wait, what? She says "vented through an outside wall"? Does Michelle think someone will chop a hole in the outside wall for an appliance she says is easy to move from one room to another? In other words, you chop holes in the walls of several rooms? Or leave the door ajar a few inches so you can lay the vent hose across the threshold?

Although Miley blithely says that,

"Portable air conditioners also work well when you have a window large enough for the drainage hose of a portable unit but too small to house a large window unit..."

...that's dodging the question. Of course, it never occurred to Michelle to research the world of through-the-wall A/C units or of split systems. Nope, once our Dumbass of the Day discovered that there are portable A/C units out there, her work was "done."

Even though it wasn't.

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