You said servicing the central AC will certainly be cheaper in the long run. That’s wrong.

It might be, but it depends on a lot of other factors.

You seem to be biased against window ACs for some reason, and seem hell bent on misinforming people about them.

Decent modern window ACs will have a higher baseline efficiency than older full house units, and cool just the room you want. Conduction losses through the wall are minimal compared to trying to to cool literally 10x as much space. They are incredibly easy to DIY, and cost $500 up front, but you’ll get half that back when you sell it when you’re done with it. Literally the same price as the AC tech who’s gonna come out and say that you need to install more return ducts, insulation, or another unit to keep up with the increased average outdoor temperature.

Like literally everything else, some are built cheaply, some are built well. Look up reviews before you buy.

Yeah for new installs but service for the existing unit might be like $200 for a cleaning and it’s certainly going to be cheaper to run in the long run

No, it’s not necessarily.

From an electricity usage standpoint, it’s cheaper to inefficiently cool one room than it is to efficiently cool a whole house.

Cleaning it also may solve nothing, it’s $200 on a chance of it solving the problem. If cleanliness wasn’t the issue, then you just wasted $200. On the flip side, you can find a used window AC for $200 easily, or buy a new one for $400 and then sell it when you’re done with it and get $200 back, and it is guaranteed to solve your problem assuming you’re concerned with a specific room.

While the dual hose ones are better, I agree that these all kind of suck because you have the compressor inside and it’s always the loudest part of an AC.

This isn’t actually necessarily true if you just need specific cooling.

If for instance, you just care about cooling your bedroom for sleeping, then it can be more efficient to install a window unit in just that room and let the rest of your house be warmer. A mini-split would be more efficient than a window unit for that role, but they’re also a lot more expensive and permanent.

So you have three options, I’m going to break them down just because I think comparing all three is helpful for long term planning, but skip to the end for advice on a specific window unit.

1. Upgrading your central AC and/ or it’s duct work.

• Cons:
  • 💰 Expensive - central units are expensive
  • 🧑‍🔬 Installation - these require professional installation from certified technicians.
  • 🪚 Duct work - if it requires duct work changes then modifying the house to accomodate is a whole nother headache.
• Pros:
  • 😸 Efficiency / long term electricity savings - a newer central AC will be more efficient for cooling the whole house down. They typically have SEER ratings in the 15-18 range.
  • 🔇 Noise - you might hear them start up, but most rooms of the house hear nothing from the vents.
  • ☀️ Light - they don’t impact natural window light at all
  • 🌡️Heat Pump - newer units are typically heat pumps that can efficiently and economically heat your house in the winter or at least shoulder seasons.

2. Getting a window unit.

• Cons:
  • 🌥️ Light Reduction - Blocks some of the window
  • 😿 Efficiency - Typically* lower efficiency ratings
  • 🔊 Noise - You’ll inherently have more noise from a fan blowing cold air into the room (compared to a central vent), and because the outdoor compressor unit is so close, most window units* also have quite a lot of sound coming from the outdoor portion.
  • 🥶 AC Only - Typically no heat pump capabilities.
• Pros:
  • 🫰Cheap - Lowest up front cost
  • 👨‍🔧 Easy installation - DIY
  • ↪️ Portability - Can be removed or sold later if it’s not needed.
  • 😸Efficiency? - while central AC units are typically more efficient on a per unit of cooling basis, if your window AC is in the right room it can actually be more efficient overall. i.e. if it’s in your bedroom, even if the window unit is less efficient than a central one, you might use less electricity just cooling your bedroom and letting the rest of the house get warmer.

3. Mini - Split Systems - install a compressor outside your house and a blower unit in a specific room or hallway

• Cons

  • 💲💲Expensive - these are more expensive than window units up front by quite a bit.

  • 🙇/👩‍🔧 Installation - Potential DIY - while they do sell DIY mini-split systems that don’t require professional installation, you’ll be limited by the length of pipe / hoses they provide, so need a suitable spot for your compressor unit. Otherwise you’ll need a pro to install it.

  • 🔉Noise - since the compressor is outside and separated by a wall you shouldn’t hear it if it’s mounted properly, but you do still have an indoor blower unit. It’ll be quieter than a window unit but louder than a vent.

• Pros
  • ☀️ Light - no light blocking
  • 🐸 Efficiency - Mini splits often have efficiency ratings that meet or exceed central units, on top of the fact that they can be used to just cool the needed room.
  • 🌡️Heat Pump - these are also typically heat pumps.

If it were me personally, and I owned the house, and I was worried about cooling my bedroom, and I had the money and somewhere to mount the compressor, I would buy a DIY mini split system. I will always want my bedroom to be cold for sleeping and the rest of the house doesn’t need to be that cold (and vice versa in winter since they’re heat pumps that go both ways). The only real downsides are the very light fan noise from the blower unit, and the upfront cost, though that can potentially be mitigated if you live in a jurisdiction that offers some type of home retrofit or heat pump grant (worth checking!).

That being said there’s a bunch of caveats and criteria there that I personally didn’t meet, so I bought one of those Midea U shaped units that everyone talks about and am honestly very happy. There was a massive recall recently, but they’re adding drains to fix the issue, and these units otherwise are way better than most other window units, though they only work with windows that slide up and down vertically.

*But unlike most other window ACs, the U shaped units have the window sit between the outdoor unit and the indoor unit which blocks most of the noise from the compressor, lets more natural light come in, and doesn’t require blocking the sides. They’re also very efficient with a CEER rating of 15.

Even despite the recall they’re still what I’d personally recommend, you might be able to find one second hand.

Also note that I don’t consider a portable air conditioner an option. They’re terrible.

No, literally no goal posts have ever been moved.

The point was and always has been, that widespread availability of guns does not effectively resist tyranny in the modern era, but does kill numerous people needlessly.

All you have shown, is a couple random examples of guns being used to take ineffective pot shots at governments that ultimately crush them.

You have provided literally not a single example of people successfully using personal firearms to resist government oppression, let alone at a scale that would justify the thousands and thousands and thousands of needless deaths.

You’re just a gun lover blindly trying to justify a reason for owning them when one doesn’t exist.

Oh so you’re advocating for resisting in unproductive ways that don’t accomplish your goals? Glad to get that out in the open.

Also, the Provisional IRA primarily used military weapons leftover from WW2, modern ones to the era smuggled in from Libya, and homemade IEDs, so not a particularly relevant example.

You’re referring to the Provisional IRA?

Tell us again how successful they were in their goals of ending British rule in Northern Ireland.

Yeah, did you read the examples you gave?

Your literal only modern example is a case in Fiji, an island with a population the size of Nashville, Tennessee, and army of 6,500 people.

And the coup was only successful because the special forces unit of the army that was run by a former SAS commander joined the coup and armed them.

Personal firearms have basically never been used to resist government tyranny in the US or entire rest of the developed world in modern times.

What does consistently work is mass mobilization and turning out in numbers.

No, it really didn’t benefit them in any meaningful way.

Widespread gun ownership has gotten an enormous number of innocent people killed though.

You would Franz Ferdinand your way to a needless war.

Unilaterally labelling people ‘fascists’ and thus worthy of death, makes you a fascist.

We aren’t. Guns drastically increase the death rates of violence and attempted suicide. Banning guns will reduce these. It does this at the cost of the state obtaining a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. I believe we can drastically reduce the rate of fun violence through testing requirements before someone can buy a gun, like what we do with cars.

The state always maintains that monopoly. If citizens buy guns, the police militarize.

Citizens do not enact change with the state through guns, they do so through numbers, by turning out and striking en masse.

But most importantly, many Americans believe that the equalizing force of firearms—something that allows the citizenry to defend themselves against tyranny and for the weak/frail to defend themselves against the physically strong— is philosophically worth a small reduction in public safety.

How many times guns have helped resist tyranny in the US?

I’ll start citing innocent people killed by the tyranny of widespread gun availability.

Nope.

Just objectively and provably false, this is NRA talking point nonsense.

Guns increase the rates of suicide, they increase the rates of domestic violence murder, and they make everyone less safe around police by giving police an excuse to use deadly force.

Guns also are not manufactured clandestinely en masse, anywhere, because it takes a lot of precise industrial machining to do at scale. They are not like sex or weed that are impossible to ban, when you stop manufacturing them for nonsense reasons, they stop circulating and criminals stop being able to get their hands on them.

I do not understand why Americans think they are such unfathomably unique snowflakes that none of the evidence or lessons learned from every other developed country could apply to them.

Oh do tell us the value of goods and services transported every day by gun.

Because I can give you a number for the approximate economic value provided by cars and vehicular transportation generally, can you tell us the economic value provided by guns and every random person being able to point and click murder whenever they want?

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Yeah, it’s explicitly distinct from const a: String which says it won’t change, and var a: String, which means this is legacy code that needs fixing.

Do you know how many innocent people’s blood that has cost?

Encouraging people to arms themselves will get people killed. You’re racing to the bottom in a doom loop and yelling hell yeah nonsensically rather than actually trying to break out of that doom loop.

America is fucked because it’s convinced it’s population that it has to keep participating in its toxic behaviours to survive. That’s false. It’s literally just fear mongering.