Tosot is a sub-brand of a chinese company called gree electric appliances - that's been around for about 20 years, they're a major player in the global hvac market and in addition to this portable unit, they also produce mini split systems as well as window units and dehumidifiers.
They claim to have over 300 million customers worldwide as an overall company, but the tosa brand doesn't have much traction or much name recognition. Yet in the united states, this portable air conditioner, which is currently the only size that toso sells, is rated at 8 000 btus. In the older ashrae rating system that translates to a rating of 5000 btus in the more current doe, 2017 standard, so make sure if you're, comparing this unit to a window unit or other type of air conditioner that you use the doe rating.
As it is more accurate, unfortunately, I could not find an eer rating for this air conditioner, which i'm going to criticize them a little bit for eer ratings are the best indicator of how energy efficient an air conditioner is so not publishing. That number makes me suspicious that the product is not very efficient more on that later toso sizes, this air conditioner, for a room of up to 300 square feet.
It comes with a one year, warranty which is standard for portable air conditioners across the major brands. But you can get a free six month, extension by registering the product with the manufacturer, so let's get started, unboxing it and take a closer look. This is a heavy box, so just a warning ahead of time. It may take two people to lift it's on small casters to move around on the floor a little bit once you unbox it, but the term portable air conditioner may be a little misleading to some people.
You aren't going to be able to take this on the go. Not only is it too heavy to move around much but as you'll see when we unbox it and start hooking it up, it requires an exhaust duct that will vent to the outside of your home. So please keep that in mind, even though it says portable, it's going to be tethered to a short exhaust hose that is connected to your window inside the box. You can see all of the accessories that it comes with to connect the air conditioner to your window, that includes some flexible ducting, two exhaust connectors or joints power, cord hooks for cable management, various kinds of insulation, all right enough talk, let's install this thing and put It to the test i'm going to use this air conditioner in my office, which gets really hot in the summer, due to all of the servers and network equipment that I have on two different server racks.
Some of you that are subscribers or familiar with my blog may have seen a past article where I built a homemade portable air conditioner and installed it in my closet, because my hoa doesn't allow window unit air conditioners. So what I did was I bought a cheap window unit, air conditioner. I built a wooden box to house it in, and then I built an intake and exhaust system where the intakes pulls cooler, air from my garage and then the exhaust pushes the hot air up into my attic.
This system has been working really flawlessly for over six years now, but it does take up a lot of space in my closet. So i'm curious to see how the tosot compares to it for comparison's sake. The window unit is a frigidaire that is rated for 6000 btus using the doe standard, so the frigidaire on paper is a little bit more powerful. However, frigidaire only rates it for 250 square feet of living space, so by that measure it may not perform as well as the tosot.
The only way to know for sure is to test the performance of both to test them i'll, be using a usb temperature, logger and i'll run, both air conditioners in exactly the same spot. In my closet, I will run them each from about noon. To the end of the day, when i'm ready to go to bed first up, let's test out the frigidaire after running for a normal day, here's the data log for the frigidaire. As you can see on max cooling settings, it performs pretty consistently throughout the day and keeps the temperature hovering around 20 degrees celsius or 68 degrees fahrenheit.
Some people might like it a few degrees colder, but keep in mind that the air conditioner is fighting against a dozen heat producing machines in the room. Now, let's see what the tosot can do, I removed the frigidaire setup and installed the tosot in its place, since the provided exhaust hose cannot reach the nearest window from this position, I reused one of the insulated ducts. I already had to vent the hot exhaust air into the garage.
You can't see it, but under the insulation on the duct is a hose clamp that keeps an airtight seal where the toe soap duct connects to my own pre-existing duct. I turned the toe soap on max cooling settings and fired it up. The lowest set point on the toe, so it is 61 degrees fahrenheit, while the frigidaire was 60, but that won't affect testing, because neither air conditioner will ever reach that in my office.
After running for another normal day in my office, here is the data log of the tosot. Now this is a little interesting and i'm not sure what is happening here with the ups and downs. The ambient temperature outside both of the days of testing was within a few degrees of each other, and I kept my office door shut the whole day except for entering and leaving the room. But, for whatever reason, the torso got down to a little over 20 degrees celsius and then it stopped performing as well for several hours until later.
In the evening before I shut off the test, however, you interpret the data, though the toso did not perform as well as the frigidaire, but there's more to the story, remember that I said we would talk more about energy efficiency later on well during testing. I hooked up each of the air conditioner setups to a kilowatt meter to measure the real world energy consumption. I let each system run for about 10 minutes to stabilize and then recorded how many watts it was using.
The tosot was consuming a whopping 830 watts, while the frigidaire only used 450. In fairness in my setup, the frigidaire also needs two duct fans to make it work. So if you add those in as well, you add on another 150 watts for a total of 600 watts, but the tosot still used 38 percent more energy than the frigidaire and didn't perform as well. In conclusion, it may not be fair to compare a portable air conditioner to a window unit and some of the tosot's limitations are the same for any portable air conditioner brand.
I love how the tow soap looks and it has really good build quality. And while I don't have a decibel meter to measure the noise, the toso does seem to be slightly quieter than the frigidaire. The accessories and installation kit with the toasters are great and an 18-month warranty leads the industry from what i've seen and even though the window unit performed a little bit better. There are still plenty of use cases where an ugly window unit.
Air conditioner is not the right solution and you should look at a portable air conditioner like the toast soap and because my blog is all about self-reliance. Having one of these in your home in case of a grid down situation, or if your central air system dies. Could be a lifesaver, the tosot could be easily run off of even the smallest gas generators for many hours. While you wait for repairs or for power to be restored, that'll do it for another review article be sure to hit subscribe if you're new, to my blog and thanks for reading guys
