Amana portable AC
There's more to this portable air conditioner than meets the eye
The Amana portable AC (model AP077R) provides reliable air conditioning at a reasonable energy efficiency while allowing you to move the unit from room to room as needed.
Setting up the Amana portable AC
One thing you should know up front with the Amana portable AC, as with any portable air conditioner, is that you absolutely must vent it to the outdoors when it is in cooling mode. It comes with a hose that you attach to the provided window slider; the window slider fits in a window opening. I've heard people complain that a portable AC unit wasn't truly portable if it has to vent to the out-of-doors, but such complaints show the person lacks a basic understanding of physics. Air conditioners work by extracting heat from the air in your room; they have to send that heat somewhere! If the Amana portable AC didn't vent that heat outside, it would have to vent it right back into the room, which means the unit wouldn't cool the room down at all.
You do need to be careful, when installing this unit, to get a good tight fit around the window slider in the window opening. This can be challenging depending on the size of your window. Unfortunately the documentation for the AP077R is not that easy to follow and technical support (see below under the Quality heading) is hard to come by!
You'll also need to locate your Amana portable AC within 5 feet of the window where it vents its exhaust air. It would have been nice if the manufacturer could provide a longer hose.
Finally, when setting up, bear in mind that the louvers or vent flaps only move up or down, not left and right, so you can't direct the airflow anywhere but to the front of the unit.
Cooling power and efficiency
The Amana portable AC cools quickly once plugged in. Of course, how quickly it cools will depend on the size of the room it's in, whether the room is closed or has doors open to other areas of your living space, and how beastly hot it is! A 7,000 BTU air conditioner such as the AP077R should be powerful enough to cool a room of 200 to 300 square feet (e.g. a 15 x 15 foot room).
Some people don't find a portable AC unit has the cooling power of a window unit of the same BTU output. Of course, if you are using the automatic evaporation feature in your portable AC unit, then it will be less effective at cooling, because the evaporation essentially prevents the unit from lowering humidity in the room, which makes it feel warmer (the higher the humidity, the warmer a given temperature feels).
This unit was ENERGY STAR compliant at the time of its manufacture, and so some utilities may still offer a small ENERGY STAR rebate for its purchase, but I personally do not think it scores very well on the efficiency front. The rating I was able to find for this unit is EER 8.2 - whereas the best portable air conditioners have EER ratings of 11 to 13 or more. It may be that they rated it while it was running in its evaporating mode; as I mentioned this will reduce the efficiency.
Ease of use: remote-only operation, awkward to move around
The Amana portable AC looks deceptively easy to use - there's just an on/off button on the unit. However it comes with a remote control, in fact two remote controls, so you can control it from your bed at night, for example. This seems like a sensible feature provided you don't happen to lose the remote! You might want to keep the remote in your bedside table - and the spare in another location, both out of reach of your dog if you have one. (Mine likes to chew through speaker wires but so far has left the remotes alone!)
Another ease of use feature of this unit is that it can evaporate water internally, which means it won't shut off due to a full internal reservoir (if it's operating in evaporation mode). Typically in humid conditions the unit will shut off every 4 hours if it's condensing the air's humidity into the reservoir; having it not do so is a big help. My own recommendation is to not use the auto evaporation feature except while you're sleeping, because it significantly lowers the efficiency of the unit and the effectiveness of its cooling; the more humid the air, the hotter it feels, and the evaporation feature just pumps the water back into the air that the unit just removed. So empty the reservoir when you go to bed, switch to auto evaporation mode for a good night's sleep, and then switch it back to regular mode (or off, if you're leaving the room for the day).
The unit can double as a dehumidifier, although I strongly recommend buying a separate energy efficient dehumidifier for that purpose, as I very much doubt the Amana portable AC is nearly as efficient at dehumidifying as an appliance built specifically for that purpose.
And of course the Amana portable AC can be operated in fan mode only. So you have a three-in-one system: air conditioner, dehumidifier, and room fan! Of course it will use much less energy when running in fan-only mode than in either air conditioning or dehumidifying mode.
The unit is relatively easy to move from room to room on its handy casters, but bear in mind it can be challenging to get it over a raised threshold, and it's not really portable enough to haul up and down stairs on a regular basis. It is pretty sturdy on its casters and is unlikely to fall over when bumped - but if you drop it while carrying it to the basement, you could do major damage.
Like most room air conditioners, this unit is not whisper-silent. One good feature is that you rarely get a sudden burst of noise when the compressor kicks in; this can be a problem with other air conditioners, where you get used to a certain level of white noise, and when it starts up the compressor after an idle period there's a big increase in the noise output. The Amana portable AC is quieter in its fan-only mode than in its cooling or dehumidifying modes.
Quality and service
The Amana corporation has had a reputation since 1934 for great quality. Its central air conditioners are generally very reliable (provided they have been installed correctly). The Amana portable AC, however, is not made or even sold by Amana. Instead, it seems that Amana sold its reputation to allow another company, Haier, to sell these units to Americans more easily, since people tend to buy a brand they trust. Haier is a government-owned corporation from the People's Republic of China, founded before the Chinese revolution of 1949.
One implication of this hazy ownership structure is that it can be quite challenging to get support. Amana does not even acknowledge the existince of Amana portable AC systems on its website, and Haier does not acknowledge Amana as one of its brands. As noted above, the documentation is not terribly useful which means you're more likely to need support, but people have reported difficulty getting the support they need via telephone or the Web.
The unit does come with a 1 year parts and labor and 5 year compressor warranty. The unit is fairly sturdy and is probably no worse than many of the other Chinese-made air conditioners on the market today (including the many that have been rebranded to well-known American brand names, such as the Maytag window air conditioner). It appears that this unit is no longer manufactured, which may mean that you can get it for a steal from various Internet shopping sites - but you may discover it's a great deal only because getting service or warranty support is a challenge, as was the case with the Maytag units (see link above).
Comparing the features and appearance of the Amana portable AC
and the Haier
CPRB07XC7 portable AC
  Amana portable AC APO77R 7000-BTU - 8.2 EER |
 
Haier portable AC CPRBO7XC7 |
As you can see, they both have similar controls / decals on the right near the top, but the Haier unit looks more modern. You can certainly find better deals on the Amana portable AC if you shop around online - I've seen it for as low as $199 - but bear in mind you may be buying a product that is no longer supported, or at least where getting warranty support or help on a customer service line will be a challenge.
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