It's not too late to get a portable air conditioner before the UK heatwave hits, and they don't cost a fortune — I bought one three years ago, and I'm so grateful to past me

Close-up of a sleek air conditioner control panel displaying temperature — (Image credit: Pexels / Geri Tech)

The first giant heatwave of the summer in the UK is about to arrive, and while I'm obviously delighted to have beautiful weather over the Bank Holiday, I'm also sure I'm not alone in fearing the increasingly oppressive feeling of building heat we tend to get in British homes, especially overnight.

But if you act quickly, you can still get a portable air conditioner in time for this heat wave — and based on my experience, you'll be grateful for it every time the heat and mugginess dials back up.

I can't tell you what a relief it is at night to step into a bedroom that's a cool 18C, no matter what it's been like outside. It's so much easier to enjoy the hot weather if you've slept really well each night.

What do you need to know about owning a portable air conditioner?

Last year I wrote a more in-depth piece about the seven things I thought people should know about buying a portable air conditioner, so I won't go into as much depth here, but I'll give you the short version, and you can read that piece if you want to dig in.

The key thing is that it really does feel quite different to a fan for long-term use. A fan provides a temporary reprieve by passing extra air that helps you radiate your heat away, but it's not actually cooling the room, so you get diminishing returns — and fans don't help pets so much.

As I mentioned above, overnight is when I really feel like building a shrine to whichever scientific genius worked out how to make air con portable. You can just go into your bedroom and… sleep. No waiting for it to cool down with the windows open, no dance of throwing covers on and off — it's just pleasant and relaxing.

But portable air cons come with a bunch of practical considerations. The warm air has to be vented out of the room, so the air con needs to be positioned near a window, with a tube going out of the window, and the rest of the window's gap ideally blocked off.

But the air con also needs power, so if you don't have a power socket near the window, you may need an extension cable — but make sure it's good quality, because air cons suck up quite a bit of juice. And that's also something else to bear in mind: they will cost you money to run.

They can also only cool one room at a time, so make sure you close the door of that room, and let it do its thing. Don't try to cool the whole floor, or the whole house; you'll get nowhere. Being portable, you can move it from room to room, of course, so you could cool your home office during the day and move it to the bedroom to run in the evening.

But they're also bulky and really heavy, so you likely won't want to move one up and down stairs, if you can avoid it.

Mine just lives upstairs, and moves between the two rooms we have there, and then goes into the spare room closet when it's not in use. It's been dormant for a good nine months, but I'm going to wake it from its hibernation this weekend — and I'm so glad it's there and ready to go.

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Matt is TechRadar's Managing Editor for Entertainment, meaning he's in charge of persuading our team of writers and reviewers to watch the latest TV shows and movies on gorgeous TVs and listen to fantastic speakers and headphones. It's a tough task, as you can imagine. Matt has over a decade of experience in tech publishing, and previously ran the TV & audio coverage for our colleagues at T3.com, and before that he edited T3 magazine. During his career, he's also contributed to places as varied as Creative Bloq, PC Gamer, PetsRadar, MacLife, and Edge. TV and movie nerdism is his speciality, and he goes to the cinema three times a week. He's always happy to explain the virtues of Dolby Vision over a drink, but he might need to use props, like he's explaining the offside rule.