MeacoCool Pro 9000

The MeacoCool Pro 9000 is a 9,000 BTU single-hose portable air conditioner built to cool a medium room of roughly 16 to 26 m², and it is one of the better portables you can buy in the UK right now. It cools quickly and holds a room steady, runs on low-impact R290 refrigerant, and its A energy rating plus Wi-Fi app make it cheaper to run and easier to live with than most rivals. For a living room, home office or spare room you want cool by the time you sit down, it is an easy recommendation.

The one thing to be clear-eyed about is noise. Despite the low-noise billing it settles into the mid-50s dB(A) and climbs into the high 50s on full power, so it is comfortable in a daytime living space but not silent enough to sleep right beside. The app is genuinely useful but a little rough around the edges, there are only two fan speeds, and at around 24 kg it is a unit you wheel rather than carry. It comes in a cooling-only version and a cooling-and-heating (CH) version for year-round use, and at £370 to £410 it is priced fairly for what it delivers.

The Pro 9000 is a single-hose portable air conditioner: a free-standing unit on castors that cools the room and vents the hot 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 the sort of cooling you buy, wheel into place and switch on the same day. The 9,000 BTU (roughly 2.6 kW) output is sized for a medium room, comfortably a living room, bedroom or home office of about 16 to 26 m².

It suits anyone who wants effective, low-fuss cooling without the cost or disruption of a fitted split. It cools fast, runs on R290 refrigerant with an A energy rating, and is self-evaporating, which means that in cooling mode it recycles most of the moisture it pulls out of the air and only rarely needs draining. The Meaco app adds Wi-Fi scheduling and pre-cooling, so you can have the room cool before you walk in. The cooling-and-heating (CH) version adds a heat mode that turns it into a year-round unit, useful in a shoulder-season room a central heating system struggles to warm quickly.

Who should think twice? Anyone who needs near-silent running to sleep beside it. Like every portable, the compressor and fan sit in the room with you, and this one is efficient and well made rather than whisper-quiet. The honest use pattern for a bedroom is to pre-cool the room, then knock it down to sleep mode or switch it off, rather than run it on full all night.

Expect to pay around £370 to £410. Costco UK is usually the cheapest at £369.99 including delivery, Meaco sells it direct at £409.99 with a 3-year warranty, and the cooling-only version is priced much the same. It is also stocked by Argos, Amazon and specialist retailers, and it does sell out in heatwaves, so check stock as well as price before you commit.

Running costs are modest for a portable. It draws a little over 1 kW at full cooling, so at the July 2026 Ofgem price cap of 26.11p per kWh it costs roughly 21p to 26p an hour, less once the compressor starts cycling rather than running flat out. A typical UK summer of occasional evening and weekend use lands somewhere around £20 to £30. The A energy rating and R290 refrigerant are a real part of why it is cheaper to run than many rivals. Prices and rates correct as of July 2026; the energy price cap changes quarterly, so check current rates before budgeting.