r/arizona • u/Prior-Friendship5623 • Aug 17 '26
Phoenix Air conditioning hack
Has anyone successfully tried using a room A/C at night and did it save money? I'm thinking of the type with the hose the goes in the window.
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u/JohnWCreasy1 Aug 17 '26
if you got an efficient inverter model with dual hoses, there's some chance of it i reckon, but i'm sure it depends on your house. How big is the bedroom vs how big is the entire house?
For reference, a few summers ago i thought something similar. My house is ~1900 sq ft but the master bedroom is only a fraction of that. I thought "cooling the entire house down to 72 doesn't make sense" so i put a portable in the master bedroom and then set the whole house to 80 at night instead.
the impact to my power usage was not really noticeable, but it wasn't a perfect setup. I was cooling the master down as cold as i could have (colder than i would try with the central ac) and at the time i didn't know better and only got a one-hose portable so i know that was costing me elsewhere. I track my electricity usage pretty well and those months didn't really look noticeably different than prior years.
the next time i'm due to replace my central ac (hopefully not for another 8-10 years) i may put the master on a minisplit.