Are you on the hunt for the best air conditioners? A smart ac unit like the Frigidaire FGRC1044T1 10,000 BTU Smart Window Air Conditioner can save you a lot of money in the summer. If you need a more portable unit consider your room size, for more details see below.
Portable air conditioners have a lot of benefits over their window-based cousins: they’re quieter, more powerful, and much more flexible when it comes to where they can or can’t be installed. But now Hisense has gone and decided to up the ante even more, adding a whole range of wireless features to their latest 10,000 BTU portable air conditioner that brings this age-old appliance roaring straight into the 21st century. If you want an example of another high-quality air conditioning device, take a look at our review of this Evaporative Mist indoor fan that cools like AC.
But will a smartphone app alone be enough to make up for any shortcomings this air conditioning unit might have? Read on in our Hisense 10,000 BTU air conditioner review to find out!
Overview
Price: $369 at Lowes
Available: July 2017
Model: AP10CW1G
Summary: The Hisense AP10CW1G 10,000 BTU Wi-Fi portable air conditioner is a petite, powerful, and feature-packed air conditioner that will cool smaller apartments or living rooms on a tight budget.
WHY IT’S A TOP PICK: The Hisense AP10CW1G is a terrific value packed into a powerfully small frame.
What We Liked
- Easy to set-up
- Quiet operation
- Great price point
- Powerful enough to cool rooms up to 500 sq. ft
- Wi-Fi features are extensive
What We Didn’t
- Design isn’t much to look at
Hisense 10,000 BTU Portable WiFi Air Conditioner Specs
 | |
| Hisense 10,000 BTU Portable Wi-Fi Air Conditioner | |
| BTUs | 10,000 |
| Wi-Fi + App? |  |
| Weight | 64.4 lbs |
| Size | 28.1 x 17.4 x 64.4 |
| IR Remote | |
| Air Purification |  |
| Price | $369.00 |
| Buy Now |
Design and Hardware
When it comes to major home appliances that take up central areas of your living space, I fall into two categories on the design side of things. First, there’s the part of me that wishes someone would take the reigns and start “Apple-fying” these types of appliances, rounding off the hard corners and giving them a sleek matte white finish. The hOmelabs 12,000 BTU portable A/C almost does this with their design, but not quite.
On the other side of things though, I can also appreciate low-priced, low-designed options like the Hisense 10,000 BTU portable air conditioner. At just over 28 inches high, the Hisense truly puts earns the “portable” part of its name, as this is an air conditioner that will fit in just about any size room you can squeeze into. The 64.4lb unit is mounted on four-wheel casters so you can easily slide it from room to room if you’re on hardwood, and it uses a single-hose design to mount its exhaust pipe in the window.
As made obvious by the name, the Hisense 10,000 BTU portable Wi-Fi air conditioner has a 10,000 BTU cooling unit, and comes with integrated Wi-Fi capabilities as well as an included dehumidifier. The air conditioner has buttons on the top to control the temperature through +/- symbols, a small LCD panel on the top and front of the unit which displays the current temperature in the room, as well as a button to switch between Fan, Cool, and Dry modes.
To control anything beyond those features, such as the sleep timer or the scheduling option, you’ll need to either use the included IR remote or install the Hi-Smart Air app from either Google Play or the iOS App Store.
Setup/Software
With its single-hose design, the Hisense 10,000 BTU can be installed in almost any window type you’d find in a standard US home. We installed ours on a bay window that opened outward, and from getting it out of the box to turning it on it only took us about 10 minutes to have everything installed properly.
Once we got the hardware side of things taken care of, it was time to see what we could control with the Hi-Smart Air app. This is where the real value of the Hisense starts to make sense over traditional A/C options. The Hi-Smart app lets you customize, schedule, and change every setting on the A/C wirelessly, freeing you up to do everything from changing the airflow type to set how long you want the A/C to run before it shuts off at night. The ability to program the A/C for a specific cooling schedule is also a nice touch, and is reminiscent of the same features you might see on a system like Google’s Nest Thermostat.
Performance
Despite a bargain-basement price tag of just $369.00, the Hisense 10,000 BTU portable air conditioner always felt like it was punching at least 2,000 – 5,000 BTUs above its weight class when it came to raw performance. It’s definitely stronger than the Haier Serenity Series Quiet 6,000 BTU window air conditioner and comparable to the Innovair air conditioner.
Even though the Hisense is only rated to cool a room with a maximum size of 300 sq. ft, we found it was easily able to handle our 505 sq. ft testing apartment on days that pushed up to 95°.
We tested during a 100° day (exterior temperature) to check how long it would take to cool a 95° room down in 30-minute increments.
- Starting at 95°, the Hisense 10,000 BTU was able to reduce the temperature from around 10° down to 85.4° in 30 minutes from 20ft away.
- After another 30 minutes passed, we checked again to see the room was now sitting comfortably at 76°, where it stayed until the room eventually cooled for the evening.
With the help of a Taylor Digital Indoor/Outdoor thermometer, we were also able to see how accurate the temperature gauge of the air conditioner was (not very, as you’ll see in the picture below), as well as how evenly the air conditioner was able to cool the rest of the apartment.
Readings at both the base station and the remote thermometer placed at the other end of the apartment had similar temps (within <5 degrees each time), meaning that even though the Hisense was installed in the living room, it was still able to get its cold air back to the bedroom (with the door open), no problem. This was backed up by the temperature results we read on the Piper NV home security camera, which is installed in my apartment’s kitchen about 10ft from the front door.
Once the days sweltered past 95° though, that’s when we started to see more diminishing returns. On the hottest day of testing (104° here in NE Portland, Oregon), the Hisense could only keep our apartment down to about 74° according to digital thermometer results taken from within the testing environment.
Last, there was the decibel impact of the Hisense portable A/C, which was once again surprisingly better than most of the competition out there, considering the price. From 10 ft away we measured a max decibel rating of 55.3dB, which is well below the 65dB we measured on the LG LP1415WXRSM tested here last year.
Wrap Up
We love everything about the Hisense 10,000 BTU portable air conditioner, and we’re sure you will too. Whether it was the dummy-ready simple setup process or just the sheer amount of power we got out of such a small unit at this price point, the Hisense impresses on every front possible.
If you’re shopping on a budget, and want an AC that you can use to cool a smaller apartment or living room in a larger house, this is the unit for you. Admittedly the 10,000 BTU cooler did struggle to keep up on particularly hot days which pushed past the 100° range, but outside of those select cases, the Hisense proved itself to be the best bang for your buck in smart home appliances out there today.
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