Air Conditioners Tips

Fujitronic FA-1310S Portable Air Conditioner Product MPNMPN:FA1310S Other FeaturesFilter:Reusable Key FeaturesAC Type:Porta...

Fujitronic FA-1310 Air Conditioner Product MPNMPN:FA1310 Other FeaturesFilter:Reusable Key FeaturesAdditional Cha...

I recently moved to the southern california area. As anyone who lives here knows, in this place, AC is a necessity. Summer temperatures are regularly in the 90s and 100s day after day. Upon moving into my new apartment, I discovered the 10 year old through the wall AC unit that came with the place couldn’t even cool off the living room with all the doors shut. Sad, really. It could only catch up well after sunset, when inside temps would finally get down to the 70s. It had to run 24/7 to keep it anywhere close to cool inside. I had three options:

1) Pay a high electric bill and not get adequate cooling

2) Start raising hell with the landlord about the unit and try to get it fixed, probably spending several weeks in the process and not getting anywhere

3) Move to a different apartment

I initially started down #2, but realized I wasn’t going to get anywhere. The ownership believes that 85 degrees inside is acceptable and that the unit running 24/7 is also acceptable. Maintanance also came to “clean” the unit out, but it didn’t make a difference. At that point, I decided I needed another AC.

I couldn’t replace the one they had in the wall, unfortunately, and in addition, window AC units are not permitted in the sliding windows. That left either a swamp cooler, or a portable AC, or try to find another apartment. Not very good choices.

The problem with portable ACs has always been that they take inside air and force it outside, which means the unit cannot be very efficient due to hot outside air being drawn in to replace the inside air. The air has to come from somewhere. I had always wondered why manufacturers didn’t make two hoses so that this wasn’t a problem. Apparently they have recently woken up to this fact, and dual hoses are now appearing on portable AC units. Once I discovered this, I decided I’d get a portable AC with dual hoses.

Unfortunately, I could not find one retail place in the area that had them. Window AC units were also all sold out. Not surprising, given that it’s summer. That left mail order. So I went with a place I’ve been buying stuff online for years now. This one was the only one they had with dual hoses. I paid around $400 for the unit itself, but unfortunately, shipping was $70 and then there was sales tax on top of that for another $33, so in the end I dropped over half a grand on the thing. For that much money, the thing had better work.

UPS finally dropped it off around 7pm, and I got to unpacking it, and decided to set it up in the living room where the wall unit was. The first problem I ran into was the flimsy plastic window kit. It was over 90 degrees inside when I hooked up the hoses to the window kit, got the thing in the window right, and turned the AC on. The unit seemed to be blowing out cold enough air, not as cold as a window unit but still decent. So I went out to get some takeout, and was back in ten minutes. Imagine my surprise when I saw the two hoses laying on the floor. The window kit for the hoses had become all warped due to the heat from the exhaust hose.

The air coming out of the discharge hose can get very hot. Apparently Fujitronic did not even consider this possibility. So, if you decide to get this unit, you’ll need to make your own window kit with a board and two holes cut in it. For $400+, they really should include a much higher quality window mount kit. Very bad.

So I was now faced with the choice of fighting to return the unit, paying another $70+ to ship the thing back, and waiting for several hot weeks to get a refund and a different AC unit, or trying to make do with what I had. I chose the second option, probably not the best choice, I know, but I really didn’t feel like sweating it out for weeks on end because of a stupid little thing like this. Not to mention, none of the brick and mortars around here have dual hose portable units. Most stores are completely sold out of all ACs period, and some places even just fans. This is my only ticket to a cool apartment.

I made a temporary window mounting kit with a styrofoam board, and was back up and running again. (And before anyone criticizes me by saying that does not insulate adequately, styrofoam is in fact an excellent insulator, and in each case I have ensured that the open portion of the window is acceptably covered and as airtight as possible) Now, this unit is rated at 13,000 BTUs, and Fujitronic claims that it can cool 400 square feet. That’s a 20′x20′ room. The living room area in my apartment is about 18′x18′ (324 square feet). I found that this unit had even more of a problem trying to cool the room than the 10,000 btu through the wall unit. One of the problems is the hot air hose. It gets really hot, to the point where it is radiating heat. So, in order to remove this heat source, one must put some kind of insulation around the hot air hose. Before doing this, I decided to see if it would cool the bedroom (which is a paltry 122 square feet). It could, but it struggled and had to run all the time to do so. A 13,000 btu AC struggling to cool a 122 square foot room. Pathetic. It ran more like a 5000btu unit.

I found some insulation for the hot air hose. That helped quite a bit, and after wrapping the insulation around the hot air hose, the AC cooled more like a 7000 btu unit. Still not acceptable, at least to me. I knew then and there that this AC would never be able to cool my living room, so I gave up, and decided to just use it to cool the bedroom. That way, since I work on my PC most of the time, I could just stay in there with it running, and leave the one that came with the apartment off to save on the electric bill. A window unit, if allowed, would be a lot less hassle, and certainly a lot less expensive to run.

So, after moving this into the bedroom, I decided I may as well squeeze all the BTUs out of it I can for the power it takes. The way to acheive that is to minimize the distance the air has to travel to get to the condenser coil and then back outside again. End result: less surface area to radiate heat from, and better cooling. How to accomplish this? Raise it so that the two hose connections at the back of the unit were above the level of the bottom edge of the sliding window. How did I do this? Cinder blocks and a thick, solid piece of plywood. I then took the thick styrofoam board and put the flanges into the holes in the board, completely eliminating the removable hoses. So it is now flush with the window and there are no hoses necessary. As close to a window unit as you can get, and still in compliance with the draconian “no objects may protrude beyond the window” rule. With this latest fix, the unit is working quite a bit better. I’d say it’s on par with a 8,000 btu unit now as far as cooling goes.

Here’s an update on the cooling this thing does, now that it is a couple weeks after I wrote my initial review. With my “modifications” listed above, this can keep the bedroom a good 30 degrees colder than the outside. There was a day when it was 103 outside, and inside my bedroom it was comfortably in the mid 70s. But remember, my bedroom is only 122 square feet or so. And Fujitronic’s claim to cooling was 400 square feet. So, I can say with certainty, don’t believe what they claim. Subtract about 5,000 btu from the actual figure and go off that.

Suffice it to say, this much trial and error and effort really shouldn’t be necessary to get something to work as advertised. Unfortunately, in the portable AC unit market, the set of standards seem to be much lower. The question you may be asking at this point, how does everything else work on this unit? Fujitronic says it is a “3 in 1″ device: Dehumidifer, fan, and AC.

A dehumidifer uses a humidistat. I haven’t been able to find one yet, and there’s no mention of one in the manual. The only threshold you can set with this unit is temperature. Thankfully, they give you a nice range of temperature to work with, 60 to 90 degrees. And 1 degree increments. That’s a plus. I have not had a use for the dehumidifying function yet, it really does not get that humid in this climate. So I cannot report on its usefulness. I just wonder how it is supposed to work if you can’t set the desired relative humidity percentage. Not very well, I’d imagine. Not to mention, the holding tank for the water really does not look to be big enough to run this as a humidifier unless you enjoy perodic trips to empty it. You’d really have to hook up a drain hose to it.

Speaking of humidity, this thing is good at making it when the compressor isn’t on. Any AC unit basically turns into an evaporative humidifer once the compressor cuts off and the fan is blowing air over the moisture saturated evaporator coils. Most manufacturers give an “energy” or “power” save option that turns the fan off along with the compressor. This does save energy, but the bigger advantage is that you don’t have the air being humidified while the compressor is off. Unfortunately, Fujitronic seems to have decided that this is not a needed feature. So, you either have to manually turn the unit off when the compressor cycles off, or just live with a humid room. Unacceptable.

There is a timer function on this unit, so you can set it to turn off after a specified integer of hours. Unfortunately, the thing beeps when it shuts off, so if you use this thing in your bedroom and set it to turn off overnight, it’s liable to wake you up with the beep when it shuts off. It’d really be nice if the thing didn’t beep when it shut off on timer. Other digital AC units don’t do this. Yes, I did forget to mention that this is a digital, not analog unit. It comes with a remote and a digital LED readout panel. Of course most AC units these days are digital.

In terms of power usage, this thing is a beast. 1350 watts. For all that power consumption, the thing really should cool better. Expensive to run when you live in a place where electricity rates can reach 32 cents per kilowatt hour. Ideally, if this thing really did put out 13,000 BTUs, it wouldn’t have to run all the time, so the high power requirement wouldn’t be as much of a problem. The compressor and its fan are what really eats the power, when those cycle off, or the unit is in fan only mode it only takes a couple hundred watts.

Update: When I had the unit brought in to Fujitronic HQ, one of the techs used an amp meter on it. On cooling mode, it was very steady around 10 amps. That translates to roughly 1200 watts.

Most of this review I am aware, has been negative. But I am just relaying my experiences first hand. The unit does have some good points to it. One impressive feature is that the unit has two motors: One to run the fan that blows air over the cooling coil, and a separate one to cool the condenser & compressor. This one even cycles off with the compressor, meaning it’s a lot quieter when the compressor is off. The other advantage of the two motor system is that the condenser and compressor are always being optimally cooled, even if you have the cooling fan on low. With one motor units, you sacrifice some efficiency when you run the fan on lower settings. This unit does not have that problem.

In my earlier review, I had commented on how quiet this thing was. Well, no longer. It seems to have gotten louder, and there’s a rather loud whine of what sounds like water being thrashed about or the coolant rushing through the evaporator coil when the compressor is on. It is related to the compressor being on, because the noise fades away when it cycles off. With this in mind, this thing is just as loud as a window unit. But, quieter than a window unit sounds from the outside, if that’s any solace (it shouldn’t be). No points there.

What about the condensate? In many portable AC units, you are forced to empty the tank periodically. Fortunately, this unit runs the condensate over the condenser coils, evaporating it and blowing it outside. This means that you should never have to empty the condensate tank. When I first wrote this review, I had stated I would have to see how well this worked. A couple weeks later, I now know, and the results are not really in Fujitronic’s favor.

This thing began leaking all over the place, even though the condensate plug was firmly in place. Completely unacceptable. I had to put a tray underneath it to catch the leakage. I called up Fujitronic and told them what it was doing. Now, fortunately for me, their manufacturing center happens to be just two cities over in City of Industry. For most people, this problem would mean paying UPS over $70 to ship it back to get it fixed. Fujitronic should have to pay that, I’m not sure if they would or not. I brought the unit over to their warehouse, and the tech came into the lobby and brought it to the back. About 15 minutes later he came back out with it and said he found the problem, apparently the hose for the pump was in the wrong place, and it was directing the water down the inside walls instead of over the condensate coil. So, whenever the pump ran, the thing began leaking. Since he fixed it, it hasn’t leaked anymore, but this is just another item in a list of substandard, poor QA.

I cannot in good conscience recommend this AC to anyone. There’s just too many problems and drawbacks, and too much work to invest in getting the thing to work properly.

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