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- [00:00]
Robert Vinloen
Hey, I'm Robert Vinloen. I'm from New York Times Games, and I'm here talking to people about wordle and the wordle Archive. Do you all play wordle?
- [00:06]
Christine Cyrclassette
I play it every day.
- [00:07]
Kyra Blackwell
All right.
- [00:07]
Robert Vinloen
I have something exciting to show you. It's the wordle Archive.
- [00:10]
Kyra Blackwell
What?
- [00:12]
Robert Vinloen
Okay, that's awesome. So now you can play every wordle that has ever existed. There's like, a thousand puzzles. What?
- [00:18]
Kyra Blackwell
Wordle Archive.
- [00:19]
Christine Cyrclassette
Oh, cool.
- [00:20]
Kyra Blackwell
Now you can do yesterday's wordle. If you missed it, New York Times game subscribers can now access the entire Wordle archive. Find out more at nytimes.com games. Subscribe by June 2020 2nd to get a special offer.
- [00:38]
Christine Cyrclassette
I would love for you to explain in the simplest terms how AC works.
- [00:44]
Robert Vinloen
Sure. So there's a little fairy inside the box.
- [00:46]
Rosie Guerin
Okay.
- [00:49]
Christine Cyrclassette
I'm Christine Cyrclassette.
- [00:51]
Rosie Guerin
I'm Kyra Blackwell.
- [00:52]
Tom Dunn
I'm Rosie Guerin. And you're listening to the Wirecutter Show.
- [01:02]
Christine Cyrclassette
This episode is called Optimize youe ac.
- [01:11]
Robert Vinloen
Hello.
- [01:11]
Rosie Guerin
Hi.
- [01:12]
Robert Vinloen
Hello.
- [01:12]
Tom Dunn
Welcome to another episode of the Wirecutter Show, Kyra and Christine.
- [01:15]
Christine Cyrclassette
Oh, well, hello, Rosie.
- [01:17]
Rosie Guerin
Why are we talking like this?
- [01:18]
Tom Dunn
Today is a serious topic.
- [01:21]
Christine Cyrclassette
It's hot.
- [01:22]
Tom Dunn
It is hot.
- [01:23]
Christine Cyrclassette
It's so hot.
- [01:23]
Tom Dunn
It's so hot. And actually, let's get serious about talking about cooling off your house. This is the time of year I have to start prodding my super to install our AC window units because it is so hot.
- [01:36]
Rosie Guerin
My super never offered to uninstall and install my AC units.
- [01:39]
Tom Dunn
I think it's a liability thing, which, honestly, I'm glad because I never felt confident about, you know, throwing those units in and slamming the window down.
- [01:49]
Christine Cyrclassette
Yeah, my husband does it and I. I just leave.
- [01:52]
Tom Dunn
I don't have one of those.
- [01:53]
Rosie Guerin
I'll see you later.
- [01:54]
Christine Cyrclassette
Oh, well, yeah.
- [01:55]
Tom Dunn
I mean, I have window units, but not a husband.
- [01:59]
Christine Cyrclassette
Well, I grew up without ac. A lot of people. I'm from the Pacific Northwest, and a lot of people in the Pacific Northwest do not have ac. And that is becoming a bigger issue because it's getting hotter. A lot of people don't have windows that will fit a window ac, and a lot of people don't have central ac. So it can be really tricky.
- [02:16]
Tom Dunn
I remember in the dead of summer having to rely on the window fans that my dad would install in my bedroom. This was before we had central air. And it was like, yeah, that was what we had.
- [02:28]
Christine Cyrclassette
Yeah. We have a lot of coverage on our site around air conditioners. We have guides to window units and portable units and split units, which we're going to talk about in a little bit. But we also have a lot of coverage around how to keep your home cool even if you do not have ac. And there's a lot of different strategies you can use.
- [02:47]
Tom Dunn
Yep.
- [02:48]
Rosie Guerin
So today on the show, we're going to talk with staff writer Tom Dunn, who reviews all kinds of air conditioning units. He's going to walk us through how window and portable units have become a lot better over the past decade. And and he'll also share some strategies that anybody can use, regardless of the type of AC they're using to keep their home cooler.
- [03:06]
Christine Cyrclassette
And we're also going to talk with senior staff writer Liam McCabe about heat pumps, which can replace a traditional AC system. This can be a really beneficial investment if you're a homeowner thinking about upgrading your heating and cooling system.
- [03:19]
Tom Dunn
And a bit later, we're going to tell you about a recent recall of Wirecutter's favorite window ac, the Midea Ultimate. Christine will lay out how to figure out if you have a recalled model at home and what you can do about it. So we'll be back after a break with everything you need to know about ACS with Tom Dunn. Stick around.
- [03:43]
A.O. Scott
This is A.O. scott. I'm a critic at the New York Times. These days there are so many movies and books and television shows and songs that it's hard to make sense of it all. At the New York Times, what the critics do is sort through as much of that as we can to come up with advice, with recommendations to guide you toward the stuff that's worth your time and attention. But we don't only offer guidance. Critics are here to help you make sense of things, to get you thinking about the way a movie connects with history or politics, the way a song opens up emotion, how a piece of art illuminates the world in the magical way that only art can do. Really, what I do and what the other critics here do is part of the same project that all of the journalists at the New York Times work on every day to give you clarity and perspective and above all, a deeper understanding of the world. When you subscribe to the New York Times, it's not just here are the headlines, but here's the way everything fits together. If you'd like to subscribe, Please go to nytimes.com subscribe.
- [04:52]
Rosie Guerin
Welcome back. With us now is Tom Dunn, who's a staff writer who focuses on heating, cooling and humidification gear. He's tested over 100 ACs and fans for Wirecutter. Since 2017, for our Window AC guide alone, Tom has tested over four dozen AC units, and he's manually installing them in his home in the muggy Boston heat himself.
- [05:15]
Christine Cyrclassette
Welcome to the show.
- [05:15]
Robert Vinloen
Thank you for having me.
- [05:16]
Tom Dunn
God's work, Tom. God's work. Tom, how are you testing all of these window AC units in your home? Is it like you have 48 windows and 48 AC units?
- [05:26]
Robert Vinloen
The first year I tested this, we actually lived in Ithaca, New York, and I had an extra guest room that had, like, three hung windows in it. It's the kind that vertically slides up and down. And I think my neighbors thought I was a psychopath because I had three ACs stacked in all the windows of one bedroom at our home. Now I have exactly one hung window. So my spring is a nice frantic ballet as I wait for the weather. And I have kind of all the ACs ready to go to pop them in there. And I take my first kind of, like, round of tests as kind of as quickly as possible as the weather permits in April and May. Once I can identify the best of the ACs I have, I can start to really dig in deeper on various metrics and various experiences that I like to look for as I test them to figure out which ones are the best.
- [06:16]
Tom Dunn
What are the metrics?
- [06:17]
Robert Vinloen
Generally speaking, most window air conditioners, the specs that you get on the box on, like, the Energy Star label or whatever, are usually pretty accurate. They tell you what the energy efficiency is. They give you an approximate power level and room size. That's usually all pretty accurate because Energy Star tracks that stuff, and that's great. So what I try to do is I measure the noise level with the fan, the different fan settings, the different compressor settings. I don't just measure the volume. I have a spectrometer on my phone so I can see what kind of frequencies are spiking here and there. So, like, oh, that one I was just testing on right before this call, and I noticed that when the compressor was on, it added, like, 10 decibels just on the low end. And I had these really annoying spikes so I could look at the spectrometer and be like, oh, yeah, that's that whining thing in my ear that's making me want to hit myself in the head. That's what that sound is. And I take those notes. And while I do that, I also. I have it plugged into an energy consumption monitor so I can track how much power it's using.
- [07:14]
Tom Dunn
So you're actually measuring the Energy output, you're measuring noise level, what else makes it into the metric?
- [07:21]
Robert Vinloen
So then I also have a few monitors set up around my office so I can track over the course of several hours how the temperature and the humidity changes. The general testing process is that I will let them run for usually about two hours. And I leave the monitors one about three feet away and one about six feet away on a diagonal, and I track all the changes in temperature and humidity and. And I go back and look at that and be like, how well is it moving air around the room? How quickly did it cool the room? And the whole time I do that, I am sitting in the room taking notes anyway, seeing like how comfortable does this. Maybe I thought a fan was kind of loud at first, but then when you're sitting in the room, you go, yeah, no, that's okay. Sometimes you sit in the room and you think it's a great air conditioner. And then you go, why am I so uncomfortable right now? And then you start digging in more as to figure out what about this one is making me kind of feel miserable.
- [08:08]
Tom Dunn
Is user experience part of the testing as well? Just in terms of how you get this in and out of a window, if it's a window unit, or how you have to maintain it if you need to maintain it at all, User.
- [08:21]
Robert Vinloen
Experience is definitely a factor. It is kind of a funny catch with acs because I think as a general rule we can expect that they're all sort of miserable to deal with. They're all kind of cumbersome, they're all kind of heavy. None of them are fun to lug into a window and pull the top window down quickly to hold it in place. Some of them are worse than others and some of them are better than others. I our kind of long running. What's our budget pick now is this Frigidaire model. I kind of look at that as like the most perfectly mediocre air conditioner you could find.
- [08:50]
Tom Dunn
It's the one to beat.
- [08:52]
Robert Vinloen
Yeah. So I kind of look. That's like. That's our budget pick at the moment. We recommended it for years because it's like perfectly fine. And that's kind of like the metric point I use for how easy is this one to put together and install or how easier to controls here.
- [09:06]
Christine Cyrclassette
Tom, I would love for you to explain in the simplest terms how AC works because it's just like magic. There's cool air that comes in. It's great, but I actually don't know what's happening inside the machine. So can you just explain how AC works?
- [09:24]
Robert Vinloen
Sure. So there's a little fairy inside the box. Okay. So your ac, whether it's whatever kind it is, it's basically sucking in the air from the house, and then it drags it over a coil of cooled refrigerant, a chemical that gets really cold as it drags the air over the cold coil. That cold coil pulls out some of the heat particles and some of the moisture, kind of like when a cold cup sweats in the summer. So it collects the heat and the moisture on the cold coil. And there's this whole refrigerant compression, and then condensing process. But the TLDR version is that there's a fan that then takes the moisture and the hot air and blows it out the back, and then another fan that takes whatever's left and throws it back into the room.
- [10:10]
Christine Cyrclassette
So it's like this sort of cycle pulling in the hot air from inside your home, cooling it off, and then spitting out the cooled air back into your room and all the hot stuff back out outside. Okay. And it doesn't matter what type of AC you have, whether it's a window unit, a portable unit, central air, any kind of AC works in the same way.
- [10:28]
Robert Vinloen
Correct.
- [10:29]
Tom Dunn
What is the difference between a window unit and a portable unit, like an.
- [10:33]
Robert Vinloen
Air conditioner in general is whatever, you know, conditions your air. And that could be your. Your central H VAC system. It could be a heat pump. It could be a window or portable air conditioner. Window units require a hung window. The hung window helps to keep the window AC in place. So that's kind of a requirement. And it dumps. Half the unit is in the house, half the unit is outside. So it you get the good stuff on the inside, the bad stuff all goes outside. Not everyone has a hung window, though. There are all kinds of different windows there. For various reasons, you might not be able to put a window unit in your hung window, even if you have one.
- [11:06]
Rosie Guerin
But my house upstate has windows that open left to right.
- [11:11]
Robert Vinloen
Those are not hung. In that case, you would need to use a portable air conditioner. And portable air conditioners are a bit more adaptable. That's the good thing about them. They often come with these kind of window kits that can fit into all kinds of different other window settings. You can really make them work in a lot of different scenarios, including in a hung window. The trick with the portable ac, though, is that they're not as efficient as a window unit. First of all, you have a big, like, R2D2 looking thing that has to sit there in your room and it takes up space. There's also the fact that it has these clunky octopus tentacle hoses that have to pump the air out the window. So you have to exhaust some of the air. And by, like basic physics of mechanics, when all the hardware inside the air conditioner is working, it produces some heat. So the portable AC is now sitting in your room producing heat, radiating heat out of itself, and then you're also trying to cool the room. But by trying to cool the room, AC itself is working against itself by heating up. And then it also has to push the hot air that it's removing from the room out of the tubes and out the window. But even then, like, you're starting to lose some of the hot air as it moves out of those tubes and then it leaks into your room. So the portable AC is kind of fighting against itself. Whereas when you have a window air conditioner right in the window there, it's pushing the cold air into the room and it's pushing all the hot air and mechanical heat radiation out the back.
- [12:38]
Rosie Guerin
Outside, most of the window and portable units. That wirecutter recommends that you recommend, Tom, use something called an inverter compressor. You see that word all over the guides. What is that and why is it important? And how does it actually make an AC more efficient?
- [12:53]
Robert Vinloen
The compressor is the part of your air conditioner that when you turn it on and you hear it in the background, go, that's the compressor. Okay. What that does is it helps transform the cold refrigerant from a liquid into a high pressure gas, which you can then expel outside along with all the other hot air it collects. Historically, These compressors had two modes, on or off, 0 or 100%. And that's why it made that annoying noise. A lot of people complain about their older air conditioners that when they start, you're like, oh, it's on. Okay, I hear it because there's the fan and then there's just that low rumble and it just kicks on and it's annoying. An inverter compressor works more like the gas pedal on a car. You can push it all the way and, like really throttle up, or you can, like, slowly ease on the gas and you don't ever have to stop the car completely. It's energy efficient, and it's much, much.
- [13:43]
Christine Cyrclassette
Much more pleasant and it's more energy efficient. Tom, is that because if you're fully stopped and then to restart and get up to speed, whether you're In a car or whether you're getting up to speed in, like the machine running. That takes more energy than just running at a low level all the time.
- [13:58]
Robert Vinloen
Exactly. It takes a lot more energy to start and get into motion. Whereas if you were already in motion, you keep going.
- [14:04]
Tom Dunn
If I have an older AC unit without an inverter compressor, it sounds like I should consider upgrading it.
- [14:12]
Robert Vinloen
Yes and no. Generally speaking, I'm against upgrading your air conditioner unless you absolutely have to. Maybe that's just my larger environmental concerns. You have these chemical refrigerants which are not good for the planet. You don't want to dump those into the town dump. You have all this metal and Styrofoam. But if your machine is hurting, if it's not cool in the air and you need a new air conditioner, I would absolutely recommend looking for an inverter model whenever possible.
- [14:43]
Rosie Guerin
Well, I remember in my first apartment in New York, it was a three bed. It was tiny, but for whatever reason, the only AC unit that my dad thought to give me was like £100. Huge. We carried it up six flights of stairs and we decided to put it in the living room. It like overly cooled the living room and all of the bedrooms stayed hot. And I just wonder what size AC unit should I have gotten for that apartment to make it a livable space? So I know that AC units come in all these different sizes, but how do you know if you're getting the right size?
- [15:15]
Robert Vinloen
Well, first of all, in that situation. So your, your living room was cool, right?
- [15:18]
Rosie Guerin
Yeah, it was freezing, but the bedrooms were all steaming.
- [15:22]
Robert Vinloen
Okay. The trick there is you should have left the doors open during the day and had some fans running. That could have helped a lot. And I know you have roommates you don't want.
- [15:29]
Rosie Guerin
Like, we all just basically live in the one room. It's just all the doors are open.
- [15:33]
Robert Vinloen
Right. I, I do understand that. And that puts you in a weird spot. So that way it wouldn't be miserably cold in the living room and it would spread that air around. Okay, but on a larger scale. Answer to that question. ACs are typically sized in BTUs, which are British thermal units. I don't know why the Brits.
- [15:52]
Tom Dunn
Colonialism.
- [15:53]
Robert Vinloen
Yeah. I don't know why who, who, who in Britain invented this necessarily, but it is the amount of energy needed to heat one pound of water by one degree. Most of these air conditioners that you'll find today give a room size recommendation. So we typically test using 8000 BTU models. 8000 BTUs are usually recommended for rooms of like 250 to 350 square feet. I'm guessing, Kyra, that your dad got you like a 12,000 BTU AC for that room. I'm going to guess, which is usually for like 450 or 500 square feet and up.
- [16:28]
Rosie Guerin
I mean, our entire apartment is probably like 300 square feet total.
- [16:32]
Robert Vinloen
Right? You lived in New York. I get it. Yeah. It can be tempting to be like, oh, cool, this one's bigger and colder, but that is a temptation you should resist. Last year I was, I started wondering about this because they were so much cheaper. Especially I found that Costco always had sales on huge versions of our picks. And what I found, I did some tests. Last year I was testing one of the 12,000 BTU units in my office space. I was so miserable, I went and grabbed a hoodie and I was sitting here and I was like, okay, it's July, it is 85 degrees outside and I just went to get a hoodie. My office felt like I was in Ireland. There was. I just felt damp. And that's because the larger ACs can do a worse job of removing the moisture from the air. So they will do a fantastic freaking job of just cooling your room really fast. Your room goes from 80 to 60 and you're comfortable. Great. You think? Except the humidity in the room has big, barely changed at that point and now you are feeling clammy and you are feeling damp and it sucks.
- [17:40]
Christine Cyrclassette
So basically, Tom, to keep your home as comfortable as you can be for, for the temperature, you should get an AC unit appropriately sized for your space. And then if you're finding that you're still not feeling quite comfortable, it might actually be a humidity issue. Right. The room is cool enough, but the humidity might be too high.
- [17:57]
Robert Vinloen
Yeah, the acs direct some of their energy to cooling and some of it to moisture removal. And the larger ones just can't remove as much of the moisture as quickly. I will add, a lot of air conditioners come with built in dehumidifier modes and a lot of them also have some sort of auto setting. And for most people, I actually, especially if you have an inverter model, I actually recommend just leaving your AC pretty much all summer on, on the auto setting because that way there are some days where it's not that hot, but it's really humid and the AC will flip over to dehumidify mode and actually cool you down.
- [18:33]
Tom Dunn
So to that end, Tom, the $100 million question. Do we need to be turning our AC off when we leave the house or the apartment to save energy.
- [18:45]
Robert Vinloen
No, not necessarily. As far as your own energy bill use goes, you can actually save money by leaving your air conditioner on. I did a piece last year. I set up air conditioners in my in three units stacked in my building across the course of several days during a heat wave. And for some of the days, I turned the acs off during work hours air quotes and then turn them back on like around 4pm before people got home from work. And then the other days I left them running all day at a higher temperature. And when I left it running all day, it used a lot less energy and it was ultimately more comfortable. So if you really want to save energy and be more comfortable, you want to just turn your AC up a little bit when you're not home.
- [19:31]
Tom Dunn
That's very surprising.
- [19:32]
Rosie Guerin
Hot take?
- [19:33]
Tom Dunn
Yeah, been a very hot take.
- [19:35]
Robert Vinloen
I'm going to get so many angry emails again. And you know what? I stand by it.
- [19:39]
Christine Cyrclassette
So for folks listening at home, if you're kind of in the market for either a window unit or a portable unit, which is not as great as a window unit, you might want to think about an inverter model that has an inverter compressor. And all of us should be thinking about just keeping our ACs on instead of turning them off. It can be more energy efficient that way, especially if you're using an inverter compressor.
- [20:00]
Rosie Guerin
But also get an AC unit that fits the size of your room exactly.
- [20:03]
Robert Vinloen
Bigger is not always better, folks.
- [20:07]
Christine Cyrclassette
Okay, so we've covered the basics of portable and window AC units, but for some people listening at home, you may not have a window unit or a portable unit. Maybe you have central air, which is when your heating and cooling runs through ductwork in the walls or the ceiling. Or maybe you have ductless mini splits. And those are the units that are mounted onto a wall or a ceiling or the floor that also serve as both a heater and an AC unit. So if you're a homeowner, you may end up coming to a cross in the road where you have to decide whether you're going to upgrade your AC and your heating. And oftentimes today that means you're going to be talking about a heat pump. So we're going to actually take a break right now. And when we're back, we're going on another one of our colleagues, Liam McCabe, to talk to us about heat pumps and why someone might want to consider one if they're about to upgrade their H vac system. And then, Tom, we're going to have you back and we're going to talk a little bit more about what anyone can do to keep their home cooler, whether they are using AC or whether you don't have ac and you're just kind of like facing a heat wave and you need to figure out how to keep your home cool. We'll be right back.
- [21:23]
Robert Vinloen
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- [21:25]
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Robert Vinloen
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- [21:38]
Kyra Blackwell
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- [21:56]
Rosie Guerin
Welcome back. This episode is all about keeping your home cool. This summer. Earlier we talked with Tom Dunn about what you should know about window and portable AC units, which are a great solution for people who don't have central air or split units. We're going to come back to Tom in a bit, but right now we're going to focus briefly on what homeowners should consider if they're thinking about upgrading their cooling system.
- [22:17]
Christine Cyrclassette
That's right. And for that we're going to welcome another Wirecutter colleague, senior staff writer Liam McCabe, to tell us about heat pumps, what they are and why you might want to consider one if you have a split unit or central air.
- [22:29]
Rosie Guerin
Liam, welcome to the show.
- [22:30]
Kyra Blackwell
Hi, Kyra.
- [22:31]
Rosie Guerin
Hi. So you've written about heating and cooling for Wirecutter for years and you also worked briefly at EnergySage, which is a company that helps connect heat pump and solar panel installers with homeowners, right?
- [22:43]
Kyra Blackwell
Yep, that's right.
- [22:44]
Rosie Guerin
And you've also written a lot about heat pumps and home electrification. So can you tell me what exactly a heat pump is and how does it relate to air conditioning?
- [22:55]
Kyra Blackwell
So a heat pump, they've actually been around for decades, but the tech improved a lot recently. They're all electric, so they don't use gas or oil and it's super energy efficient for heating. So there's a lot of excitement from a clean energy perspective. If your house already has ductwork in it, like it's, it's already there. You can, instead of having a furnace and an air conditioner hooked up, you can just put a heat pump on there the same way that you would hook up an air conditioner. So there's a box outside your house. You know, when we're talking about air conditioners, that's called condenser, but everyone just knows it is the big box outside the house.
- [23:32]
Rosie Guerin
Oh, with the fan.
- [23:33]
Kyra Blackwell
With the fan, yeah.
- [23:34]
Rosie Guerin
Okay.
- [23:34]
Kyra Blackwell
Yeah, yeah. And then there's an interior part, the coil, and that's attached to your ductwork, and a fan blows across it. And if the coil's cold, you're going to get cold air through your ducts. That's air conditioning. If it's hot when the furnace is running, or when the heat pump is in heating mode, it blows warm air through your ducts. That's where you get your heating. So with a ductless system, it's the same principle. You still have the outdoor box, but instead of one coil hooked up to the central ductwork in your house, you have a bunch of mini coils all around your house in every room that you want to heat and cool. And it's all contained in that wall wart, as people call it, or the indoor unit, as it's more technically referred to. It's the same process happening, it's just in a slightly different format.
- [24:27]
Rosie Guerin
That sounds very similar to the way that Tom just described how AC units work, except, you know, heat pumps can do heating and cooling, whereas acs can only do cooling.
- [24:37]
Kyra Blackwell
Right. So in cooling mode, a heat pump works exactly the same way as an air conditioner. There is actually no difference at all. People think of it like it's actually bringing cold air into your house. What it's really doing is absorbing the heat into the cold coil and then sending it outside through that box that's outside. In heating mode, it works backwards. There's a coil outside the house, too, that's soaking up the heat from the ambient air. And even when it's really cold outside, there's actually heat out there. The coil will soak up that heat, move it inside to the indoor coil, and then that will be hot or warm at least, and the fan will blow across the warm coil and move the heat throughout your house.
- [25:22]
Rosie Guerin
So I actually. I'm pretty personally invested in this because I bought an old, rickety wooden cabin in upstate New York, and it's got no heating or cooling system that's, like, centralized. It's got this gigantic propane heater and no AC at all. So I looked into getting a heat pump for the house, and I was just floored by how expensive these can be. Tens of thousands of dollars. So why switch to a heat pump if it's that expensive.
- [25:51]
Kyra Blackwell
So any kind of H VAC upgrade, a central system like a furnace or an air conditioner, especially if your home doesn't already have it, is going to be five figures. It's a similar level of expense as what you got for the mini split quote. It's a huge comfort upgrade over window ACs. Like a mini split is usually the easiest way to get central or built in AC to your house if your home doesn't already have it. And it's just a huge quality of life improvement. It's much quieter. Your windows aren't blocked, you don't have to move anything. The cheap heat you get from them is almost like a bonus. And you know, it looks better. Like not everyone loves the wall mount style. Some people call them wall warts, but.
- [26:34]
Rosie Guerin
They'Re, they're, they don't look that bad.
- [26:35]
Kyra Blackwell
Yeah, I mean and some manufacturers make some that, you know, look a little better. LG has one that looks like a picture frame and then there's different styles. You can have them floor mounted, you can put them in the ceiling. So there's a lot of different, a lot of different options.
- [26:49]
Rosie Guerin
So it sounds like it might be an upfront cost but it'll pay itself back long run. And also it's kind of just a luxury aesthetic upgrade.
- [26:57]
Kyra Blackwell
Yeah. So there is some payback. And aside from the money, you have to think about paying yourself back in terms of comfort. They usually work better also than the window ACs do though that's changed a little bit. And yeah, it's a lifestyle upgrade in a way. Just not having to deal with the hassle of the window units.
- [27:16]
Rosie Guerin
So what do you think? One thing people considering getting a heat pump don't know that they really should.
- [27:21]
Kyra Blackwell
I think the trickiest part is the installation. We know the technology works really well when it's installed correctly, but it's hard to find someone who actually knows how to do it. Well, I did some reporting on this. Depending on who I talked to, they thought it was anywhere from 30 to 50% of heat pumps are installed so badly that it really has an effect on the comfort and the costs that you can expect from your, on your utility bills.
- [27:49]
Rosie Guerin
Yikes.
- [27:50]
Kyra Blackwell
Yeah, it's, and probably more than that are subpar compared to what they could be. But 30 to 50%, you're probably going to notice a problem. It's just not living up to the potential they have for comfort and energy savings. And sometimes the technology takes the blame, but it's usually because the installer didn't set things up. Correctly.
- [28:09]
Rosie Guerin
Luckily, you wrote a piece about how to find a good heat pump installer. Right. So people can refer to your guide if they really want to know all the details.
- [28:19]
Kyra Blackwell
Yeah, I've been told it scares people as much as it helps them, but I think it's better to be informed rather than going in with without any background. So, yeah, the story's up on Wirecutter and hopefully people find it helpful.
- [28:34]
Rosie Guerin
Can you tell me how people are paying for this? Just assuming that you don't have five figures just sitting around in the bank.
- [28:41]
Kyra Blackwell
Sure. Yeah. So heat pumps are often incentivized through rebates or tax credits. There's currently, for now, a $2,000 federal tax credit if you get a system installed that meets all the requirements for efficiency. It's a fraction of the overall cost, but it's still useful. And then some states or local utility companies have their own rebate programs. You have to work with your installer. Usually there's some paperwork to do, but they can be pretty big. In Massachusetts, we've had one that will give you $10,000 back off the cost of the installation.
- [29:19]
Robert Vinloen
Wow.
- [29:20]
Kyra Blackwell
Yeah, I mean, I also found that it probably raised the price of installation by $7,000 or so. Yeah, some of the money goes into your pocket, but a lot of it goes into the pockets of the installers. And that's another. It's another topic for another time.
- [29:36]
Rosie Guerin
I guess you got to spend money to make money, or in this case, spend money so somebody else can make money.
- [29:41]
Kyra Blackwell
That's one way to think about it. Yeah. A lot of the areas that have incentives for heat pumps also have these really low interest. 0% loan programs is another way to try to encourage people to adopt this technology.
- [29:55]
Rosie Guerin
All right, well, thank you so much, Liam.
- [29:57]
Kyra Blackwell
Thanks, Kyra.
- [30:05]
Christine Cyrclassette
All right, we are back with Tom Dunn to talk about some of the universal tips that anyone can use to keep their home cooler this summer. Tom, what are some of your basic strategies that anyone could use, whether they're using AC or not, to keep their home cool this summer?
- [30:21]
Robert Vinloen
If you want to keep your home comfortable honestly all year round, weatherization is so key. You can get like weatherizing strips you can line around your windows, for example, or under your door. And that can make a humongous difference by keeping the outdoors air and the indoors air separate. You can honestly, a lot of times tell if you just put your hand near the. Near the window or near the door, and there's sometimes gaps around plumbing or if you have air conditioning or any pipes leading out of your Home. Any of those little kinds of tiny cracks you can very, very easily fill in with weather strips or with caulk. That will make probably the biggest difference, especially during the summer. You can also consider the way you're using shades. The way sunlight is getting into your room. When the sun gets into your house, it's going to get hotter. And sometimes that's awesome, especially in winter. But sometimes it's going to heat your house up and make it harder for AC to work. So just close the blinds. And it feels sometimes silly to close the blinds when it's a beautiful sunny day outside. But. But when it's a beautiful sunny day outside and the sun is boiling you at 95 degrees, you want to keep that far away from you.
- [31:26]
Christine Cyrclassette
And, Tom, there are certain shades that are more effective at blocking out heat from outside. Right. Like, I think that we have a piece on the site that talks about cellular shades.
- [31:34]
Robert Vinloen
Yes, I was grasping for the word there, but thank you. The cellular shades are a fantastic way to keep the heat on the outside.
- [31:41]
Rosie Guerin
Well, what's a cellular shade?
- [31:42]
Christine Cyrclassette
They're like, they almost look like two shades that are glued together and they're kind of like a fan almost. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And they have. They kind of create an air pocket that sort of helps insulate.
- [31:53]
Robert Vinloen
Yeah, cellular shade sounds like way fancier than you're like. And you open the box, you're like, cool. It's. It's some crinkly paper. It's a great job.
- [32:01]
Tom Dunn
Weather eyes, Window AC units. Portable AC units. What about ye olde time Fan fans.
- [32:09]
Robert Vinloen
Are where it's at. I generally prefer fans to air conditioning myself. So we have fans propped up up all over houses now. We have a heat pump, so we do use the AC a lot more now. But the fans also help to keep the cold air then circulating around the house, which makes it even better. So, as I said earlier, if you do have a, like a larger air conditioner in your home, you can use some extra fans to pull the air away from your living room or wherever and redirect it so that it goes, it moves into other parts of the house.
- [32:39]
Rosie Guerin
Yesterday, my partner and I were debating if it's better on like a boiling hot summer day to have a breeze that's blowing hot air or no breeze at all. So to that end, if you have no AC unit, but you do have fans, are you hurting yourself? Are you helping by circulating the hot air? Even though there's no cool air coming.
- [32:58]
Robert Vinloen
In, you're still helping yourself on a very basic biological Level. Right. Our bodies sweat, and the purpose of sweat is to cool us down when the wind comes by. So even if it's a hot day and you only have hot air in the house, you're sweating, and a fan is still going to blow the moisture sweat off your skin, and that's going to make your body cool down. That is literally our most basic biological cooling practice.
- [33:21]
Tom Dunn
Well, and then you have ceiling fans.
- [33:24]
Robert Vinloen
Ceiling fans. If you have a ceiling fan, just leave it on all summer. One of the neat tricks with ceiling fans is that they work just as well in the winter and the summer, but you have to make sure you change the direction of the fan. So warm air is lighter than cold air and it rises up into the room. So during the winter, you want to run your ceiling fan clockwise, which will then help to push the warm air down to the room so that you're not losing all the heat you've been generating and paying for. Then during the summertime, you want to run the opposite direction. You want your fan to run counterclockwise. That way it pulls the warm air up and out of the room and keeps pushing the cooled air back down so you're not overusing your air conditioner. Otherwise, your ceiling fan would basically be dumping your AC air over into the next room or out the window or whatever. And you don't want that.
- [34:16]
Tom Dunn
The more, you know, I've lived all these years, you never knew. Tom, thank you so much for joining us. Our thanks to Liam McCabe. Thanks, Tom.
- [34:25]
Robert Vinloen
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
- [34:32]
Christine Cyrclassette
After we recorded our interview with Tom, our favorite window ac, the Midea U was recalled. And most, if not all, Midea U buyers are eligible for either a prorated refund or a repair kit from Midea. They might also send out a technician in some cases to help you fix the unit.
- [34:49]
Tom Dunn
And this is one of Those inverter compressor ACs we discussed earlier in the show. So for listeners who have this ac, and it's a very popular one, we wanted to give you a quick cheat sheet on what to do. So, Christine, give us the who, what, where, when, why?
- [35:02]
Christine Cyrclassette
Okay. This Midea U air conditioner, which is recommended by Wirecutter and a bunch of other sites, it was recently recalled over complaints about mold growing on the fan inside the unit. Listeners should keep in mind that mold can actually grow inside any air conditioner. It's not just the Midea use, but this is an issue for this particular one. So it's important. If you do have a Midea U, you should be participating in this Recall.
- [35:24]
Tom Dunn
Okay, so what should folks do to check if they're affected?
- [35:27]
Christine Cyrclassette
To check your Midea for mold, you should look inside the grill. We're going to put a diagram in the show notes and see if there's any mold growing there.
- [35:35]
Tom Dunn
So probably use a flashlight or something like that to check.
- [35:37]
Christine Cyrclassette
Absolutely. Use a flashlight or a headlamp.
- [35:39]
Tom Dunn
And then if you find mold or if you suspect there's mold there, what can you do?
- [35:43]
Christine Cyrclassette
So, like I said, all Midea buyers are eligible for some kind of refund, but the amount varies depending on how long you've used the unit. You can get on Medea's site and check your model number to see if you're. You're part of this recall. To get the refund, you'll need to fill out a form online, and then the company will either have you return the unit with a prepaid shipping label, which seems not many people are going to do that. These are huge units. They're very heavy. Or they will ask you to cut the cord and take a picture of it and send it to them. But if you'd rather keep the unit that you already have because it's huge and maybe you don't see a lot of mold in there, the company will mail you a DIY repair kit to help the AC unit drain better, which is essentially the issue if your AC doesn't have a drain plug already, the company says it will send a technician out to drill one.
- [36:28]
Tom Dunn
And then what can folks do to reduce the chance of mold growing in their AC unit?
- [36:32]
Christine Cyrclassette
To begin with, anyone with a window AC unit should really be running the fan because that'll help everything dry out inside. And that's particularly true for these models like the Midea U, which are these inverter compressor units. So run the fan, keep things blowing. Kind of like when you run the fan in your bathroom after a shower.
- [36:50]
Tom Dunn
There you go. Thanks for that, Christine.
- [36:52]
Christine Cyrclassette
Absolutely.
- [36:56]
Tom Dunn
Today we had a doubleheader. Tom and Liam.
- [36:59]
Christine Cyrclassette
We had the heating cooling superduo.
- [37:01]
Rosie Guerin
I really didn't think I was going to find it so interesting to learn how AC units work. Yeah.
- [37:07]
Tom Dunn
What are you guys actually taking away from this app?
- [37:10]
Christine Cyrclassette
Well, I was totally shocked and surprised when Tom explained why some of these larger window air conditioners don't dehumidify as effectively. It, like, really hit home for me why one of my rooms is not as cool or as comfortable feeling as I would like it to be. But I think that I might consider getting a dehumidifier also if I can't get that room to be more comfortable.
- [37:36]
Tom Dunn
Yeah. The idea that if your AC isn't working as well as maybe you hope or want it to be, it could be a question of humidity.
- [37:45]
Christine Cyrclassette
Of humidity. And not just comfortable. Right. Exactly.
- [37:48]
Tom Dunn
My takeaway, honestly, is simple. Weatherizing.
- [37:52]
Christine Cyrclassette
Yeah. We will also link in the show notes. We have some very specific recommendations for different weatherizing tools.
- [37:57]
Rosie Guerin
I love that. My takeaway is from my talk with Liam. So I'm going to save up some coin. But then eventually in the future, I think I might actually go with the split AC unit because it's still an easier construction job than building ducts to get a whole heat pump system.
- [38:12]
Christine Cyrclassette
Yeah.
- [38:13]
Tom Dunn
Look for those incentives.
- [38:14]
Rosie Guerin
Yeah.
- [38:15]
Tom Dunn
Get a loan. Yeah.
- [38:16]
Rosie Guerin
Low interest with zero percent interest.
- [38:18]
Tom Dunn
Zero percent finance.
- [38:19]
Rosie Guerin
That's right.
- [38:21]
Tom Dunn
Well, if you want to find out more about Wirecutter's coverage of ACs, splits, heat pumps, any of it, check out our website. As ever, you can find a link in the show notes. You can check out Tom and Liam's reporting. Stay cool out there. That's it for us this week.
- [38:36]
Christine Cyrclassette
See ya.
- [38:37]
Tom Dunn
Thanks for listening.
- [38:38]
Rosie Guerin
Bye.
- [38:39]
Tom Dunn
The Wirecutter show is executive produced by me, Rosie Guerin, and produced by Abigail Keel. Engineered support from Maddie Mazziello and Nick Pittman. Today's episode was mixed by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, Alicia Ba Itup and Diane Wong. Wirecutter's deputy publisher is Cliff Levy. Ben Fruman is Wirecutter's editor in chief.
- [39:03]
Christine Cyrclassette
I'm Christine Cyr Clasette.
- [39:05]
Rosie Guerin
I'm Kyra Blackwell.
- [39:06]
Tom Dunn
And I'm Rosie Guerin.
- [39:07]
Christine Cyrclassette
Thanks for listening.
- [39:11]
Tom Dunn
Where in Boston do you live? Remind me.
- [39:13]
Kyra Blackwell
I'm out in Natick, I think. You said you had some cousins out here.
- [39:16]
Tom Dunn
Ah, I sure did.