Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

We pre-ordered 3 of these, which arrived during very cool weather so they sat unused for a month. We excitedly installed them today. They look great and have some nice features. Unfortunately, they're comically bad as actual air conditioners. Pay attention to the many poor reviews - they didn't exist when we ordered and might have saved us nearly a thousand dollars. It's loud. I know all the reviews say that, but allow me to repeat: IT'S LOUD! At the lowest setting, it is the loudest A/C I've ever had, going all the way back to 1980 when I was a poor college student and all I could afford were used units from Goodwill. There is no need for a modern appliance to be this loud. The low fan setting would make it challenging to hear a TV or listen to music or conversation. It's hard to imagine using medium or high at all. Even at low, the Eco mode's switching off and on is pretty jarring. It's bright. I have trouble believing any industrial designer thought an air conditioner needed a display so bright that it allows me to put on hand shadow shows or read 10 feet away in what is otherwise a pitch-black room. I practice sleep medicine, and I'll need to explicitly instruct my patients not to buy these unless they redesign them with a dimming circuit. The bright blue color is especially disruptive. This is not at all appropriate for use in a bedroom. My son's window is very near his bed and he might as well have a spotlight on his head. Even better, as the displayed temperature changes it creates a constant flickering effect. It's so bright that I think I'll need to turn it off before I go to bed in order to get any shut-eye. Despite the preposterously bright display, it's also fuzzy and indistinct and controls are impossible to see in the dark. This is in part because the user's night vision is wiped out by approaching the unit, but also because the touch controls aren't backlit at all and have no features that allows one to distinguish them by touch. The people with cataracts so severe they actually need a display that bright also need some way to distinguish the up and down buttons! Temperature control is impressively poor. We've tried all sorts of settings. Irrespective of where we set these, they just seem to do whatever they want. I'm sitting here sweating as I type, 5 feet from a Quirky Aros set to 74F (we usually set window A/C's to 79F). Earlier I was freezing with it set to 82F They're very inaccurate. The display that supposedly shows room temperature (for example, when it's in fan mode) is often 7-8F lower than the Nest thermostat in the same room or 2 reference thermometers that agree with each other and the Nest. It will occasionally change for no apparent reason and display a temperature that's significantly higher (a degree or two below actual) for a while before returning to much lower than actual temperature. The filter is inaccessible when the unit is installed. In our installation, which has never caused issues with 4 previous A/C's, the filter that slides out to the side has to be bent quite a bit to clear the wall. I suspect it'll break after a few cleanings. The app is buggy and strange. It shows what it claims is the current room temperature, but that seems to be permanently stuck at 81. Each time I set a temperature, after a few moments it changes itself by a few degrees. I have to be vigilant and change the temperature 3 times before it will "take". The app might eventually be fixed with a software update. Unfortunately, that won't be possible with the air conditioner itself. I'm terribly disappointed that I wasted $900 on these very pretty but unusably awful air conditioners. Don't make the same mistake I did. These are only appropriate to install in rooms in which nobody is going to try to sleep, converse, listen to anything, or get cool. Update 28 August 2015: we mailed all 3 of our units to Quirky for a software update and the LED's do now turn off after a delay. The app's ability to control the units remains very poor in that the changes (especially temperature) usually changes back by a few degrees until the command is sent a second time. The app does now show the same temperature as the unit, but that remains mostly inaccurate - it can differ from a reference thermometer placed on the unit by 10 degrees. Our units have been turning themselves back on at random and running even when they have been manually turned off. One did this yesterday when the displayed room temperature was 61 and the set temperature was 75 - there is no good reason why the unit should be running under those circumstances. One of our units simply does not cool, and never has even after having been sent back to Quirky then returned to us. There remains no way I would ever buy another one of these or recommend that anyone else do so.