Kenmore 12,000 BTU Multi-Room Air Conditioner Reviews
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Rating Summary
“Cools well, but could have used more thought in sealing”
- looking for energy savings, going green
Kenmore 12,000 BTU Multi-Room Air Conditioner —
I bought this Sears 12,000 BTU A/C to replace a 39 year old GE that finally lost its Freon.
I bought it at our local Sears store and carried it home myself. My unit arrived in good condition. I got a neighbor to help move it from the car to the house and to do the final installation of the inner unit into the installation sleeve. Don't try to move this unit alone; it's not that heavy, but it's too wide for one person to lift.
I found that the hardware and instructions were adequate, but I'm much more of a DIYer than average. I found a few faults with this design.
The worst part of this job was sealing the installation to be reasonably air tight from inside to outside. We live in an area that gets hot in the summer and cold (below 0 F) in the winter, so I was appalled to find long 3/16" gaps at the top of the side curtains that are necessary to adjust the installation to a range of window openings. I spent a lot of time adding foam strips in various places to seal everything against air intrusion all around the A/C. I added extra panels to both sides of the folding side panels to give them a tiny bit of R-value. I also spent a lot of extra time making sure that the seal between the double-hung windows was good. I don't know about other makes, but it's quite possible that this is a big problem with all window units.
I also added quite a bit of foam weatherstripping in various places. I think this will be a big help in the winter, but it probably also helped eliminate some of the rattles and squeaks that a more careless installation would produce.
I was surprised at how the water drain was installed. It's about 3/8" above the bottom of the base of the slide-in unit. This means that water will have to sit that deep before it can drain out. I'm tempted to drill a hole in the bottom to keep water from accumulating and causing corrosion. This problem could have been fixed with a very simple design change.
I added small metal plates to our window sills, to reinforce the points where the outside cabinet supports would have pushed on our wood sills. The Sears design was a point contact that would have eaten into the wood sill over time. I also had to replace the bolts in those supports with longer bolts in order to reach down to the sill.
One thing that prompted me to buy a new A/C rather than repair our old one was that the old one used R-22, which is being outlawed next year. I assumed that this unit would come with one of the newer refrigerants, and that it would be repairable should it need Freon 5 years from now. Unfortunately, this model still comes with R-22. There is no mention of this in the specs that Sears provides. It's only shown on the data plate attached to the A/C.
I don't know yet whether the on/off cycling of the Energy Saver mode is going to be annoying to us, but it seems like a simple remedy would have been to add an additional mode where the fan just switched to low speed and stayed on whenever the set temperature was reached. Given the nature of modern electronic controls, this should add no extra cost, but it would probably reduce the efficiency slightly.
I could have done without the remote control. It seems frivolus for an appliance which will usually be a set and forget item. It's a waste of resources. I would have much preferred additional energy savings.
Last edited on Jun 03, 2011
Kenmore 12,000 BTU Multi-Room Air Conditioner
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