I’ll go over the features with you on everything that we can do with it and we’ll get into the good, the bad, and the ugly of this 8000 BTU Black+Decker air conditioning unit. Let’s get this review started.
CollegeDormEssentials.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com
This is our second summer using the BLACK+DECKER air conditioner.
BLACK+DECKER BPACT08WT Portable Air Conditioner
This is an 8000 BTU air conditioner with a remote. So these types of air conditioners have to be vented; there’s a lot of hot air that blows out of the back. It sucks air in, you can feel it sucking in air from the room and this will cool the compressor down. This air will go into the ac unit and then it will go through the coils and blow the cooler out of these vents. The air that is sucked in down here will go to cool the coils and then it’ll blow hot air out of the vent so you have to have this vented to a window. It comes with a hose and with a window vent. I bought a little bit of extra insulation here to insulate it. You put insulation on your windows.
Let’s look at this remote. We got a power button, an up and a down arrow, we got a mode, a timer, we have a fan speed, max, we have sleep, Degrees Celsius and Fahrenheit, and then we have a blank button there. I set it to 76 degrees and it feels nice and cool back here, feels really good. It feels really cool at this point, it’s just recirculating the air in the room and so you know, it’s at least 78 in here because the compressor shut off, so it’s blowing 78 degrees’ air around which feels pretty good.
The reason that we have to use this type of air conditioner, the portable air conditioner and not a window unit, is because we live in HOA and our window faces the street, so we can’t have the window unit sticking out of here, people or the HOA would complain. Anyways, they’d give us a fine so we have to use a low-profile unit like this that just has a little vent out there and we don’t have to worry about bugs or birds or anything getting in because we have the window screen on. Some dust can get in here obviously, so that’s one of the downsides to this particular unit. I probably could put some kind of sealer in there to seal that but it doesn’t fit quite as snug as it should.
I’ll give you the good, the bad, and the ugly after using this Black Decker Air Conditioner for two summers. The good is obvious, it cools off pretty well. You can hit that max button and you can just continually blow out 64 degrees non-stop, and it’ll really cool your room down pretty good. It’s got a remote control so you can adjust it.
On the bad side, it’s a little bit loud. You know you can turn the fan speeds down but if that compressor’s on, it’s not going to make any difference. So the best way to use this like for my wife in here, if she’s on her phone or doing video chats or whatever, she said the sound of this when the compressor’s on full blast – it can be a little bit distracting. So, the technique that she uses is she’ll turn this on an hour before she has to work and she’ll really get the room nice and cool, and then once the compressor goes off and it’s just circulating the air from the room, the fan speeds on low and it’s pretty quiet. But once that compressor’s on, you can’t adjust the fan speed to medium-high or low or auto or anything because that compressor’s so loud that the lower fan speed is not going to make a difference; it’s going to sound the same whether it’s on low or whether it’s on high. The other bad is the window vent. This thing was a little bit difficult to set up and I had to get some extra insulation and then even then, it’s still not airtight and some dust got in here when we had a dust storm. My wife did say when we had a rainstorm, there was a little bit of water in there, too. A little bit of water came in so I’ll have to go and work on that vent a little bit better to make sure that it’s airtight and watertight.
And then, of course, we have a screen on our window. If you don’t have a screen on your window, you’re probably going to want to put some kind of screen over that vent. Obviously, it’s blowing out so you know it’s not sucking anything in but bugs or birds or whatever can get in there when it’s off, and you don’t really want that. It does not come with a screen that goes over the vent so you’re going to want to add something. 
But the advantage to this, the other good is our HOA doesn’t allow us to have a window unit here since this window faces the street, it’s against the HOA rules and we’d be fined if we did that, so this is really good if you live in HOA. You can cool off your room without having to worry about any of the vines or the HOA. The other good thing about this unit is that it’s portable, so you can move it around to different rooms in your house. But it’s not perfect. I was taking this down to the garage and putting it downstairs, but it’s a little bit of a chore to carry it up and down the stairs. We ended up getting another unit for the garage. We actually have two of them downstairs, one in each garage.
After our second summer with, this thumbs up. We’re really happy with it.
