Zero Breeze Mark 3 AC Review: Effective Portable Cooling

As nan weather heats up, nan trappings of summertime get pinch it: swimsuits, mosquitoes, and, naturally, portable air conditioning.

Go-anywhere AC is now a thing, and successful fact, I’ve been penning astir it since 2019, erstwhile Zero Breeze released its first luggable, battery-powered aerial conditioning unit. A (minor) update arrived successful 2022, but now type 3 is here. Conceptually, nan Zero Breeze Mark 3 (Roman numerals begone!) remains nan aforesaid arsenic its forebears, though nan creation has been tidied up a bit, giving it a cleaner and much polished look. Nevertheless, it’s still a beast of a instrumentality that is hardly thing that will unrecorded successful your trunk conscionable successful lawsuit you return an impromptu travel to nan beach.

Portable Air

Measuring 22 x 10 x 12 inches (without nan artillery battalion installed), nan Mark 3 is simply a small larger than nan Mark II and rather a spot heavier, now weighing 22 pounds compared to nan Mark II’s 17 pounds. Clip connected nan tremendous 1,022-Wh artillery battalion and you’re adding different 14 pounds to nan rig, though that frees you from having to beryllium adjacent a powerfulness outlet if you want to cool down.

I complained successful some of my earlier reviews that Zero Breeze’s attack to charging was a spot silly, because though nan artillery battalion physically clips onto nan bottommost of nan aerial conditioner, it uses a abstracted cablegram to connect to nan aerial conditioner’s charging port. Incredibly, this is still nan case, though you tin astatine slightest now run nan Zero Breeze from artillery powerfulness while it's simultaneously charging—something that wasn’t imaginable connected erstwhile iterations. (You still can’t tally nan Zero Breeze while charging if nan artillery is wholly dead. It needs immoderate juice, astir a 50 percent charge, to get things going, aft which it tin tally indefinitely.)

A caller characteristic is that batteries tin now beryllium stacked and charged successful series (as galore arsenic you like), each daisy-chained to nan next, though astatine a minimum of $600 per battery, this tin quickly get exorbitantly expensive. Each Mark 3 artillery besides has other outputs that tin beryllium utilized for different devices—one USB-C port, 1 USB-A port, and a 12-volt DC socket. This is simply a downgrade from nan Mark II battery, which has each of nan supra positive a 2nd USB-A port. Why it was removed is simply a mystery.