Best Smart Air Conditioners
Forget the remote. Run your AC from your smartphone or digital voice assistant.
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Most window air conditioners come with a remote, but where does that leave you when it goes missing? Sweaty and rummaging through the couch cushions.
Smart air conditioners offer a cool solution. Thanks to built-in WiFi, you can switch on a smart AC from your smartphone or by asking your voice-controlled smart assistant to do it for you. That’s pretty handy if you want to cool down the house before you get home from work but don’t want to waste energy running the AC all day.
With a smart AC, you can do more than turn it on and off remotely. You can remotely check and change the temperature, select the modes and fan speeds, easily program a cooling schedule, and, in some cases, connect several air conditioners and run them in concert. Some apps even monitor your energy use and send alerts when air filters need cleaning.
You can give anyone in the household access to take control by using the app with his or her phone.
How We Test Window ACs
After installing a unit in a double-hung window in our climate-controlled test chamber, we crank up the air temperature to 90° F, then measure how long it takes the AC to cool the space by 10° F. Regan says the best units do it in less than 15 minutes. We also gauge how accurately the AC reaches its set temperature, whether a model can recover after a simulated brownout, how intuitive the controls are, and how loud each unit is running on low and high.
If you have a Digital or All-Access membership to CR, you can read on for ratings and reviews of the smart ACs from CR’s air conditioner tests.
Best Midsized Smart AC
7,000 to 8,500 Btu; Cools 250 to 400 Square Feet
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