The 6 Best Portable Air Conditioners of 2025

Top pick

This portable AC’s powerful inverter compressor and its secondary role as a heater help it dial in a precise comfort level quietly, effectively, and efficiently for most of the year.

With its inverter compressor and its unique dual-hose design, the Midea Duo MAP14HS1TBL is more powerful, more efficient, and quieter than any other portable air conditioner we’ve tested. It’s also easier to set up and generally more pleasant to live with than similar ACs. Plus, the Duo MAP14HS1TBL comes with a built-in heating mechanism, so you may be able to use it for year-round climate control, depending on where you live.

It delivers more powerful cooling than other portable ACs. With an SACC of 12,000 Btu under the new Department of Energy standards or 14,000 Btu according to the older ASHRAE standards, the Duo MAP14HS1TBL is simply one of the most powerful portable air conditioners you can find. It also has the smallest gap we’ve seen between those two measurements—which, without getting too in the weeds, is a good indicator of a high-quality design.

It’s impressively quiet. In our tests, we measured the Duo MAP14HS1TBL running at an average volume of 48 decibels. Though that’s about 2 decibels more than the volume of our also-great pick from LG, this Midea model is still much quieter than most portable air conditioners, and its noise is still significantly below the generally accepted “normal conversation” volume of 60 decibels. Even the compressor was hardly noticeable when it first kicked on, adding about 2 decibels of low rumble to the fan volume on average.

It’s remarkably efficient. The Duo MAP14HS1TBL has a CEER rating, under the current standards, of 10.8, which is the highest efficiency rating we’ve seen on any portable air conditioner. Even our runner-up pick, also from Midea, has an efficiency rating of only 8.9. (Most models we looked at had a CEER rating between 6.8 and 7.3.) Thanks to the inverter compressor on this model, it can gradually fluctuate its power usage, as well. Whereas most similarly sized portable ACs with standard compressors tend to run at 1,300 watts, the Duo MAP14HS1TBL never used more than 970 watts during our tests, and typically it used even less.

It spreads cool air consistently around the room. The Duo MAP14HS1TBL has a rotating cylinder fan on the top that sort of tosses the cooled air up and out in an arc. In our tests, this mechanism worked surprisingly well: This portable AC was able to drop the temperature by 10 degrees in under an hour while maintaining a roughly 1-degree temperature fluctuation across the room. In that regard, it was more consistent than any other AC we tested, with the exception of our also-great pick from Frigidaire. Even the Danby model we tested, which was identical to this Midea AC in nearly every way except for the fan, couldn’t match its uniform cooling prowess.

The dual-hose design makes it easier to wrangle. Portable ACs with two hoses typically have a slight efficiency advantage over single-hose models; unfortunately, they also tend to be more cumbersome, which sort of offsets any benefit. But the Duo MAP14HS1TBL stands out with an unusual design that combines the intake and exhaust hoses into a single tube that’s built directly into the unit—giving you all the advantages of dual hoses without the frustration of having to wrestle with a pair of annoying plastic snakes that keep detaching from your air conditioner.

The installation process is surprisingly simple. Along with that built-in hose-in-hose design, the Duo MAP14HS1TBL comes with a comprehensive window-installation kit that makes it easily adaptable for a variety of homes. The kit accompanying our unit included so many hardware options that we weren’t even sure what kinds of windows they all worked for; suffice to say, there should be a way to make this AC work for almost any setup you might have. The dual hose snaps right into place on the window panels, too—though you might want to cover the cracks with some insulation tape, anyway.

It comes with a comprehensive remote control and all of the smart-home features you might need, which is especially great for accessibility. We found the built-in user interface to be particularly clear and easy to use; by contrast, the Danby model we tested had the exact same button layout with different markings, and it managed to confuse us every time. Even the Alexa voice commands for the Duo MAP14HS1TBL felt natural.

Thanks to its heating mode, this AC can handle climate control year-round. Though this guide is largely focused on portable units’ cooling capacity, we were pleasantly surprised to learn that the Duo MAP14HS1TBL also has a built-in 12,000 Btu heat pump. That’s more than enough power for it to provide some efficient electrical heating in the cooler months.

It’s one of the more attractive portable ACs we’ve seen. To be fair, that’s kind of like saying that R2-D2 is better looking than R5-D4—sure, one is a little more sleek-looking, but at the end of the day, they all resemble trash cans on wheels.