As a middle school teacher, I sometimes agree to take on the not-so-coveted task of teaching summer school.
I love what I do and I love my students, but summer school means working with kids who usually have behavioral problems in a very hot classroom.
In the past, I have used two or three fans that are running constantly. And some days I have taken the class outside for a lesson, but there are usually too many distractions outside to keep their attention. But this year I decided to look into purchasing my own portable air conditioner. What I found on some sites was that they are better than a fan, but not much. Other sites claimed that portable air conditioners are bigger, noisier, more expensive and use more energy. Unlike a window air conditioner, all the mechanical parts of a portable air conditioner are sitting in the room you’re trying to cool. And it’s debatable how portable they are, because once the hose is connected to the kit in the window, you won’t want to move the unit, which weighs 80 pounds or more. I also read that although portable air conditioners have wheels, they don’t move well on carpets or over raised thresholds between rooms. Finally, one website stated that if a portable air conditioner is the only choice, you still need fans to distribute the cooled air around the room. In the end, it seemed that there were too many strikes against purchasing a portable air conditioner. The final straw was the price, which would have almost cancelled out the income that I would make from teaching summer school.
commercial air conditioning