visitors, guitars and dehumidifiers

ancient1, I use a stand-alone or portable A/C unit in my apartment as well.  Mine is only 10,000 btu though.

Anyways, one thing I had to make sure of is that the vent hose was put in the window in a good way.  Meaning, I made a custom acrylic window with a perfect "fit" hole for the hose to clip into with no, or very little room for air gaps.  So, almost a perfect seal.

This is important to accomplish somehow, because the portable A/Cs work as a dual unit: an A/C unit and a dehumidifier.  That hose does not only vent the hot air, it vents moisture too.  Not all of it, but a good amount.  The rest drips out as you probably know.

The water that drips out needs to be dumped frequently or you end up humidifying the room just by all that water sitting in various basins and evaporating. 

Don't know if this is possible in your situation, but that's what I do to avoid that.

Frankly, I've found in my own tests with this apartment that a window unit cools it way better and more efficiently than these portable stand-alone units.  A 5,000 btu window A/C unit can cool my apartment as good as a 10,000 btu portable unit.  Something else to consider when using these things.

I can't use window units for insanely stupid reasons I won't go into, but I wish I could go back to the days when I could.

I don't like visitors- if they choose to visit the first thing they should understand is it's my residence, my rules. I'll accommodate as best I can, but, I stays here all the time- they don't. I have my thermostat (central a/c and heat) set at 77 for a/c in the summer time. My kids say they're hot when they come over I say tough, I'm comfortable.