Okay, so my general issue with air conditioners is this: the ones that go in the window are better than nothing. But the majority of windows designed for houses around the Puget Sound are sliders - not sash windows.
For those playing the home game, slider windows leave a nice fat gap of space between the top of the air conditioning unit and the top of the airconditioner. If you live on the ground floor, this means that your AC unit will be blowing hot air out the back and happily sucking it right back in.
This is where you do what I did tonight, which is:
Build a shelf for the AC unit out of plywood project scraps (though truthfully in previous years I used an aged tower computer case that perfectly fit the height of the window of my old apartment - on the balcony, and for someone more worried about redneckian style a pair of AC supports can usually be purchased from Home Depot or Lowe's)
And out of the leftover plywood, snip out a nearly perfect rectangle to fill the rest of the hole. My last place I used thick clear acrylic, but as a slice of Lexan acrylic is approximately ten times the cost of a hunk of plywood, I went with the previous option, adding window insulation foam around the edges and duct-taping the result together. My game plan tomorrow is to figure out how to secure the plywood against the frame with a carriage bolt for added security of the window, but for now I am cool enough to sleep through the night.
The other added bonus? I managed to get enough scraps of plywood to close up the back of my oldschool radio-to-computer server conversion AND have it thick enough to be able to install units that will hang off of the back. Woot, I say, woot.
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