a little write-up about

Portable Air Conditioners

starting with a reminder about single hose portable AC units

tl;dr they're terribly inefficient: they can only expel air, so part of what's being expelled is the air that just got conditioned (!). only expelling air means the pressure differential sucks outside air back in through any cracks, nooks, or crannies to make up the differential, which further hampers the effects and efficiency

Recommendations

I know not everyone can get window or central HVAC - I certainly can't! so, if you are going to get a portable AC unit, get either a dual hose system or "hose-in-hose", so it's cooling itself using outside air on a closed loop and there's no expelling of inside air or pressure issues

if you can, you'd do even better to get one that's got an inverter, which will mean that rather than just being "on at 100% power usage" or "off", it can scale with your energy needs

This is the one I got during a big sale at Costco a couple years back

I've got a kill-a-watt style device hooked up and it's surprisingly efficient! thanks to the inverter, instead of turning on and off all the time at full blast, it's able to run for longer durations pulling only 200-400kwH