Home Appliance Reviews

Finally, a new window AC LG LWHD1200FR Thru Wall/Window Air Conditioner After researching a number of AC brands, I decided on this model. It replac...

Like a breath of fresh cool air Haier HWR05XC7 Thru Wall/Window Air Conditioner Living in the South, we have a need to keep cool almost year round. Except...

We have been using this for the last day and it has made a huge difference in the comfort of us watching TV. We are using it for our TV room and the attached office (in fact it is really just one long room, 13ft x 36ft). The TV room where it is installed does stay cooler than the office but it is now cool enough to be tolerable in the office. My guess is the length of the room reduces the cooling effect so it might work better in a larger square room. Plus these two rooms are slightly larger than the 450 sq foot labeled on the box so that might also do it.

There are three different fan settings. At the lowest fan setting I cannot hear it over the TV (which is only a few feet from the AC), the second setting it is about the same as the TV volume, and the third is slightly louder than the TV but it does not really bother me as I can still tune it out. We have absolutely no complaints on the cooling ability of this unit.

The four different Modes available on this unit are Cool, Energy Saver, Fan, and Dry. When we are in the room we usually leave the unit on Cool and that keeps the two rooms very cool. If we are going to run out of the house for a short amount of time we will usually switch over to Energy Saver which will cycle the unit on and off. Even in Energy Saver when we get back the rooms are still comfortable. But we will still switch back to Cool. We have not used the Fan setting that much because it has been staying hot until pretty late in the night but it is nice to have the feature for when the afternoons are cool and we can just use the fan to draw in cool air to save money. Also we do not need the Dry mode because it does not get that humid in Colorado but I imagine that feature would be very useful in more humid climates.

There is also an ON/OFF timer that you can set for hourly increments up to 12 hours. We usually set the timer to go off around the time we go to bed in case we forget to turn it off manually so it does not run all night long.

The unit is energy efficient and the accompanying card said the yearly operating cost is $81 or $84 dollars per year (I can’t remember which). My guess is that number applies to the Energy Saver mode but I am not sure. Also the price of energy may very from one area to another. Once I have a better idea on the estimated kW/h usage I will update my review to include this.

The unit does come with a remote that allows you to control the Power, The Temp+ and Temp -, Fan Speed, Timer, and Mode. We actually don’t use the remote that came with the unit anymore as we programmed our universal remote to control the unit.

The last thing worth mentioning is the air direction and vent control. There are two independent horizontal controls so you can have half blow straight out and the other half at an angle. The horizontal control is continuous so you can set it exactly where you want it. I did not measure but it looks like it goes out at a 45 degree angle but that was just me eyeballing it. The vertical control only has two settings straight out or slightly up. Also they are stiff and you have to put a little force to get it to move. Of course the picture in the manual shows how to control the horizontal with the vertical and control of the vertical with the horizontal picture but it works just like the vents in your car. It also has vent control so you can recycle internal air to cool the room down faster or bring in external air if it start s to get stuffy.

Now for the trouble area with this unit. As others have found the install is tricky. The pictures in the manual can be confusing for where parts go, especially part number 10. We had to look ahead to see what it was used for to figure out where it went and the orientation. These issues probably added 10-15 minutes to the total install which I believe was about an hour and a half. Would have been quicker if we had gotten all the needed tools together at one time instead of running for a wrench or a screw driver each time we needed it. Also we must not have standard windows because the three screws that help hold the unit down from the inside were not long enough but that is a simple fix if you have longer screws lying around. Plus the front grille was hard to install over the control panel and took a few tries to get it right. The rest of the install went great and we had to problems.

The pros of this units cooling ability far outweighed the little bit of trouble that we had with the install. But I believe this will vary from person to person. If you don’t want to deal with these issues it might be worth having someone else install it for you but it is not necessary.

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