Comfee 9000 BTU Portable

The Comfee 9000 BTU Portable (model CPPA-09CRN7-QB6) is a single-hose portable air conditioner from Midea's value brand, and it is one of the cheapest routes to real cooling in the UK. At typical street prices of £190 to £270 it undercuts most 9,000 BTU rivals while adding things they skip at this money: a Wi-Fi app with Alexa and Google voice control, a window kit in the box and a 3-year warranty. Wheel it into a bedroom or home office of 12 to 18 m², hang the hose out of the window and it pulls the temperature down quickly. For a renter or anyone who wants cooling this week without an installer, that is a genuinely useful package.

The trade-offs are the ones that come with every budget single-hose portable, plus a couple of its own. It is loud on full power (64 dB(A) sound power on the label, about 54 to 55 dB(A) in the room), which rules out sleeping right beside it on the highest setting. The single hose makes it the least efficient way to cool, so it draws 1,000 W rated (up to 1,200 W at peak), costs around 26p an hour flat out (up to about 32p at peak draw), and runs out of headroom in a big open-plan room or a serious heatwave. The controls and manual take more working out than they should, and after-sales support is patchy if something goes wrong. Buy it at a deal price for one modest room and it earns its keep; expect split-system performance and it will disappoint.

Comfee is the value brand of Midea, one of the biggest appliance makers in the world, and this is its current 9,000 BTU single-hose portable: a free-standing unit on castors that cools the room and vents the warm air out of a window through one flexible hose. There is nothing to install and nothing that needs an F-Gas engineer, so it is cooling you order, wheel into place and switch on the same day. The 9,000 BTU (2.6 kW) output is sized for a room of 12 to 18 m², which covers most bedrooms, home offices and smaller living rooms; the 33 m² figure on the listing is optimistic and worth ignoring.

What sets it apart at this price is the kit list. The window kit and adjustable brackets come in the box, which several budget portables still skip, and it has a Wi-Fi app with Alexa and Google voice control where most rivals under £300 offer only a dial and a remote. It runs on R290 refrigerant, a propane-based gas with a very low global warming impact that is sealed inside the unit and safe in normal use. In normal cooling it is self-evaporating, recycling most of the moisture it removes out through the exhaust hose, so the drain only comes into play in humid spells or dehumidifier mode. The 3-year warranty rounds it off; two years is the norm at this level.

Who should look elsewhere? Light sleepers: the label figure is 64 dB(A) sound power, roughly 54 to 55 dB(A) in the room on the high fan, so the workable bedroom routine is to pre-cool the room and drop the fan, not to sleep beside it flat out. Anyone cooling a large or open-plan space, where a single-hose unit pulls warm air back into the room faster than it can win, and anyone hoping to tame a whole floor in a heatwave. If the budget stretches, the Midea PortaSplit costs more but moves the compressor outside, which fixes the noise and the efficiency in one go, and a fitted wall split beats any portable for a room you cool all summer.

List prices run from about £270 to £420 depending on the retailer, but the street price is the number that matters: Amazon deals have put it at £190 to £270, and at that money it is one of the cheapest 9,000 BTU portables with app control on sale in the UK. The catch is availability. Like every portable it sells out in hot spells, and at the time of writing it was out of stock across UK retailers, so treat stock as the real constraint and check the live listing rather than assuming the deal price is there when you want it. Prices correct as of October 2026.

Running costs are where the single-hose format bites. It draws 1,000 W rated at full cooling (up to 1,200 W at peak), so at the October 2026 Ofgem price cap of 26.32p per kWh that is around 26p an hour flat out (up to about 32p at peak draw), and less once the room is at temperature and the compressor cycles. A hot fortnight of evening use lands in the £10 to £20 range; run it all day through a heatwave and it adds up faster than the purchase price suggests. The Class A label is decent for a single-hose portable, but no unit of this type is cheap to run next to a fixed split. Rates updated for the October to December 2026 price cap; the energy price cap changes quarterly, so check current rates before budgeting.