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Fan and Frost

Our method

How we pick, and what we refuse to claim

Everyone in this category says they tested twenty units. We have not tested any, and we say so. Here is what we do instead — and why it is more useful to you than another hour of somebody sitting in front of a fan.

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What we do not do

We do not have a lab. We do not own any of these products. Nobody here has installed a window unit, held a decibel meter to a tower fan, or run a swamp cooler through a Phoenix August. We have never accepted a free product and no manufacturer has ever seen a page before it published.

That is unusual to admit, because the pages you are competing this one against say the opposite. Some of them are telling the truth: there are genuine labs in this category doing genuine work, and when one of them has measured something we cannot, we would rather send you there than pretend we measured it ourselves. Others are describing a photoshoot.

The claim we refuse to make is the one that would be easiest to make and hardest for you to check. So here is the count that matters:

Units we claim to have tested
0
Sponsored placements
0
Free products accepted
0

Every one of those numbers is zero because zero is the honest number and, for all three, zero is the good number. What we do have is published manufacturer specifications, the federal certification datasets, and arithmetic — all of it shown on the page so you can reproduce any figure on this site.

What we do instead

The gap in this category is not another opinion about how a fan feels. It is that almost nobody publishes the arithmetic. You can find fifty pages ranking portable air conditioners and struggle to find one that tells you what running the winner costs per night, or that the number on its box is not the number on its federal label. That is the work we do.

1. We compile the published specifications

Nameplate wattage, CFM, BTU, DOE-rated SACC, noise ratings in dBA, coverage claims, dimensions and weight — taken from the manufacturer’s own product page or spec sheet, with the URL printed next to the table. If a manufacturer publishes no wattage, the row says not published and we compute no running cost. We would rather have a visible hole in a table than a plausible-looking number nobody stated.

That happens more than you would expect, and it is worth knowing about before you buy. Vornado, for instance, publishes how far its circulators throw air in feet but no wattage and no CFM for either the 630 or the 683 — so no honest running cost for a Vornado exists in public. We say that on the page.

2. We use the federal certification data, not the marketing copy

For window air conditioners and ceiling fans there is something better than a manufacturer’s page: the ENERGY STAR certified-product datasets, which carry the tested CEER, the modeled annual kWh, and for fans the certified CFM per watt. Those are the figures our window AC and ceiling fan rankings are built on. A brand cannot write its own CEER.

The same datasets tell you something the brochures do not. There is no ENERGY STAR program for portable air conditioners at all — the catalog returns window and through-the-wall units only. That absence is a genuine buying signal, and it is on the portable-versus-window page.

3. We compute the running cost, and show the formula

Every cost figure on this site comes from one calculation:

(watts ÷ 1000) × hours × your electricity rate

We use 18.34¢/kWh, the US average residential price for June 2026, from the EIA’s Electric Power Monthly. It is cited and dated on every block that uses it, and it is refreshed monthly. Your rate is not the national average — that is exactly why we print the formula next to the answer instead of only the answer. Where ENERGY STAR publishes a certified annual kWh, we use that instead of a nameplate figure, because a variable-speed compressor spends most of its life well below nameplate and the nameplate would overstate the bill.

4. We size the room before we recommend the hardware

Sizing comes from the ENERGY STAR room air conditioner table, quoted verbatim on the BTU chart page, with ENERGY STAR’s own four adjustments for shade, sun, occupancy and kitchens. Then, for portable units, we apply the step almost nobody takes: we compare the DOE-rated SACC against the marketing BTU, because those are different numbers and only one of them describes the machine you are buying.

5. We read the manual for the constraints

Window shape, sash type, minimum window width, whether a unit straddles the sill or sits inside it, whether an existing wall sleeve is required, what the exhaust hose has to reach. These are the things that turn a good purchase into a return, and they are in the documentation rather than the listing.

How we rank

In this order:

  1. Does it fit the room? A unit that cannot serve the area you have is not a cheaper option, it is a wasted purchase. This criterion eliminates more products than the other five together.
  2. What does it cost to run? Computed, cited, and compared against the alternatives in its own category.
  3. Is the published data complete? A manufacturer that publishes wattage, dBA and CFM has told you what you need to decide. One that publishes a coverage claim and a marketing adjective has not, and we mark them down for it.
  4. Does the configuration make sense? Dual hose over single hose, window over portable, a fan where a fan is genuinely the answer.
  5. Constraints and install reality. Weight, window fit, whether a renter can actually put it in.
  6. Price, last. Deliberately last, and we do not know it when we rank — prices render live at the moment you load the page.

Every one of our 37 pages with picks names at least one product we recommend against, and says why. A list where everything is great is a list nobody should believe. The skip pick is never a strawman — it is usually a real, popular, heavily reviewed product that is wrong for the job it gets bought for.

Where our numbers come from

How to check us

Every formula is published and every source is linked, which means you can reproduce any number on this site with a calculator. That is the whole claim. If you can check our work, you do not have to trust us — and a site you can check is worth more than a site that tells you it has a lab.

Try it: take a fan’s nameplate wattage, divide by 1000, multiply by the hours you run it, multiply by your own rate from your own bill. If our figure and yours disagree by more than the rate difference, one of us has made an arithmetic error and we would like to know which.

How we make money

Amazon affiliate commissions. When you buy through a link here, Amazon pays us a percentage at no cost to you. The full disclosure is here.

Commission does not affect a ranking, and the structural reason is worth stating: our picks skew toward efficient, correctly-sized units, which are frequently the cheaper option and therefore pay us less. The 6,000 BTU unit we recommend for a small bedroom earns us less than the 24,000 BTU unit we tell you not to buy. On several pages the honest recommendation is a $30 box fan, or nothing at all.

How to correct us

Email info@fanandfrost.com. If you can point at the page and the figure, we will check it against the source. Where we are wrong we fix it and date-stamp the correction on the page itself rather than quietly editing it — the correction policy is here.

We are also glad to be told when a manufacturer has published a spec we recorded as missing. Those blanks are the least satisfying thing on the site and we would rather fill them with a citation than leave them.

Written by Sawyer V., who is an enthusiast, not an authority — and whose bio says exactly that.