Blaux Portable AC Review
(beep sound) - Finally, after all this time, my Blaux Portable AC finally arrived. And it's not even the one I ordered. Great. (techno music) Hey guys, how are you all doing? Really?
That's just great. You know I'm doing pretty great today too. If you're new here, welcome. My name is Krazy Ken and I'vebeen following a company named Strong Current Enterprises Limited for the past couple of months. Ever since these air conditionerads caught my attention, I've been keeping an eye on these guys. And if you haven't seen the first parts of this amazing journey,
I recommend checking those out first. In summary, these Blaux ads claimed that this thing was a revolutionto the air con industry. (chuckles) So ever since I started doing the episodes about this product, let's just say those adshave been taken care of, I haven't seen many of them lately. In the end, it's just a tiny swamp cooler, it's not an air conditioner by any reasonable consumer standard. So, now here we are.
The product finally arrivedbut it's not the one I ordered, it looks a little bit different. I can't really complain though because I think it actuallylooks a little bit better than the one I thought I ordered but we'll take a look at that more soon and we'll also see, hey is it worth the near$100 they charge for it. (beep sound) But before we dive intoall of that in my tests, here's a little updateon the communications I've received from the company.
To start, Paula reachedback out to me and said, "I have turned them intoavid followers of my blog," ahh shucks, you flatter me. But in regards to my past questions, when I asked about whomanufactures their product, they couldn't disclose thatinformation, alrighty then. Then I got another email fromthe Strong Current legal team. They heard that I received my product and asked how it's been. Well, I'm glad you asked. For all intents and purposes, let's just pretend thepast stuff didn't happen.
It's not a magical device,it's just a tiny swamp cooler. So how well does this thing actually work and is it worth the hundred bucks? Let's dive in. So this product is calledthe Blaux Classic Desktop AC, I guess. It does look different thanthe unit on the website and it goes by a different name. And don't be fooled by the shininess, it's not metal, just plastic.
There's adjustable vents on the front along with the power knob and there's a built-in blue mood light. On the inside, we have the watercurtain and the ice tray. This was another thing that confused me because I don't rememberan ice tray being a feature of this product.
In fact on the website theyjust show someone pouring water into the top of the device and that's it but this one works completely differently. I don't know. For this particular model,according to the instructions, you have to soak thewater curtain in water and freeze the filled ice tray. At least you get two ice trays so you can freeze the second one while the first one is in use.
I found this to be kind of cumbersome because now you haveto transport wet things and dripping things in and out of the unit and it's just not very convenient, especially if you haveit on like a wooden desk that you're working on and now you're gonna drip waterall over it, I don't know. Kind of a bad design but youget what you pay for I guess. No, actually you don't you don't.
When you pay almost a hundred bucks, you should have something that's better and less cumbersome than that. Oh, somebody help me. Inside, there's a small fanwhich, let's be real guys, this doesn't look like it'llbe able to push much air. But one thing I couldn't find no matter how hard I lookedin this thing, was a pump.
Now I'm not sure if theoriginal one I ordered was supposed to have a pump anyway and I can't confirm anything about that cause they didn't send me that one. But my bigger swampcooler has a pump in it which will take water from the tank, drip it over the water curtain and that's how the waterdrips down and evaporates, like, it's an evaporative cooler, that's what they're supposed to do. But if there's no pump in here, how does the water, whenit gets done in the tank, go back up to the watercurtain and drip down and evaporate and cool
. Like if there's no pump in there, I don't really understand howit's an effective air cooler at all. Well when I tested itout, it all made sense, it really isn't effective whatsoever. So, I ran it through some tests, let's see how well it did.
So I hijacked, borrowedsomebody's room for the test site, it's a 12 by 13 room withan eight-foot ceiling. Now keep in mind, I wasoriginally gonna test this thing with summer conditions but because it took so longto arrive, summer is over. So I had to artificiallysimulate a hot environment, I did the best I could. I cranked the electricbaseboard heater to 80 degrees, the highest it would go, and I monitored the temperature. According to my thermometer, the room temperature maxedout at 82 degrees Fahrenheit. But before I could test theBlaux, I needed a control.
So I let the room cool and Itimed the temperature decrease. Eight minutes in and theroom felt about the same and the thermometer readthe same temperature. 32 minutes in, the roomdefinitely felt cooler to me and the thermometer read 80. 64 minutes in, the roomdidn't feel any cooler and the thermometer still read 80 so I imagined this iswhere it's tapering off. So in short, we could say the room cooled about two degrees in one hour naturally without this thing running. But, now we're gonna turn this thing on and see how well it cools the room. After reheating the room to 82 degrees,
I placed the Blaux on theopposite end of the room which is furthest awayfrom the thermometer, just to test the roomtemperature as best as I could. I inserted the soakedwater curtain and ice tray then I cranked it tofull power and waited. Now the box says rapidcooling in just 30 seconds so that's why I kinda justarbitrarily chose eight minutes as my first checkpoint. But honestly, while I was running this, I didn't feel anythingdifferent eight minutes in, in fact, as I kept goingthrough the checkpoints, the thermometer read the as it did in the control when I just let the roomcool naturally by itself. So in effect, this wasn't doinganything to cool the room.
I placed my hand in front of the unit and the air felt a few degrees cooler than the room temperature. But when I held my handabout three feet away, I couldn't feel the breeze at all. But honestly, what else do youexpect from a tiny ass fan?
I mean, this fan's smallerthan some fans I see in computers, it's notgonna push much air, especially at the speed it's running at. It's not that loud which is kinda nice but that also means it's notreally spinning that fast. About 64 minutes in, Inoticed no difference, again it was the same as the control and the ice had alreadycompletely melted on the inside. So I imagined it's notgonna do much more cooling than it already has done andI felt nothing different.
You know, I set really lowexpectations for this thing and frankly, I'm still disappointed, it's worse than I thought. So now let's simulate an environment where you use it closer to your body. We're not gonna try tocool the whole room, we're just gonna try tocool a little bit of space in front of you, maybe if youuse it on a desk or something.
So I didn't change anythingfor this next experiment, I just moved the thermometer about an inch away from the vents, just to try to give it alittle bit of a headstart. One inch, it should beable to handle that. Within the eight minutes of cooling, the thermometer droppedfrom 79 degrees to 70. So it's able to coolquickly at short distances but again, you're notgonna feel the breeze from more than two to three feet away.
So if you're lying in bed andyou use it on your nightstand, you're not gonna feel itunless you lay close to it, then it might do something or if you put it on your desk like, if it's about this far away,you'll probably feel it so that's probably not a huge problem.
But other than that, you're not gonna be able tocool a room with this thing. Which is a pretty big contrastto that bold statement they claimed in that one ad. Now granted they took the ad down, so I'll give you points for that but still wow, what a load of BS. Another problem with thisthing is overflowing.
I know it says do not overfillbut hey, this is Krazy Ken, we have to push theboundaries a little bit here, big mistake. So I put the ice in there, I ran it but then I put another frozenice tray in there and ran it and, yeah a few minutes in,the tank was overflowing and it was leaking all over the table, I'm just glad I checked frequently because the water was about to drip off the edge of the surface. So if it can't handle two ice trays cause the tray is so small, that means you have to empty out the tray,every time you wanna use it, kinda silly. So aside from waitingtwo months to receive it, and by the time I did receiveit, it was the wrong one, is it worth it? No, of course not.
Yes, it can cool the air a little bit but past about three feet,you're not gonna feel much and it's definitely not gonna cool a room. Plus, the ice melts every hour so you have to refill andrefreeze the thing every hour and if you do it wrong,it's gonna overflow and leak and it's just kinda cumbersometo have to do that every hour just to get a slight cool breeze. So is it worth that 89 bucks plus tax? No way and that's whatthe so called 'discount', it's actually valued at $135. Yeah, this thing is valued at $135, makes no sense.
And the four-pack is valued at $553. You can get almost twofull-size, like window units, 10,000 BTU window airconditioners for that price, there's no way thesethings are worth that much. That's really fishy. That's it, what else can I say?
Just be wary of buying stuff online, you know, don't overpay for this stuff, be cautious of fake reviews and fake ads, just think twice before you buy. And I'm not saying dismiss everything, there's some goodlegitimate stuff out there, just think a little bit more before you press that buy button. And also, I encourage you to stick around because The Computer Clanis gonna be cranking out some more good techstuff in the coming weeks as we always do.
New tech, vintage tech andof course, knockoff tech. Yeah, I bought this watch,it's just called Watch I guess. It's an Apple Watch knockoff and I cannot wait tosee how well that works. So anyway, make sure you subscribe so you don't miss anyof that awesome stuff.
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