How this site works
ACRanker is a catalog of 54 room air conditioners from 26 manufacturers, built because the numbers that decide this purchase — delivered cooling, decibels, window opening — are scattered across PDFs that all read like advertising. 23 of the 54 units carry a star rating; the rest carry none, deliberately. Here is where everything on the page came from.
Where the specs come from
Manufacturer spec sheets and manuals first, cross-checked against independent testing and regulatory databases where they exist. When a manufacturer refuses to publish the honest number — the ASHRAE sticker BTU that overstates portables by 30-45% — we say so on the unit's page rather than quietly substituting a marketing figure. Prices are hand-maintained snapshots, shown as approximate, and never asserted as a retailer's live price.
Who writes the owner notes
Not a test lab, because there isn't one. Nobody here has bolted these units into a window, run them through a July, or measured a decibel. The pros, cons, and owner notes on each unit page are read out of public owner discussion — threads on HVAC and home-improvement forums, long-term reviews, and retailer review sections — and condensed. When enough owners say a drain pan grows mildew or a remote is unusable in the dark, that goes in the complaints in roughly the words they used. Summarizing is editorial work and we'd rather say so than dress it up as testing.
How rankings are ordered
The default sort is owner rating where we have a citable one, and objective specs otherwise. Category pages surface the best-rated and cheapest picks by computing them from the catalog itself — the numbers you see are derived from the same data file that renders every page, so a claim can't drift from the spec that backs it.
Why some ratings are hidden
Every star rating on this site is cited to a named retailer with an observed review count. If we couldn't verify one, the unit shows no stars at all — an uncited rating would be a fabricated claim about real customers. We also don't republish Amazon star ratings or review counts: Amazon's terms restrict them to their official API, so our ratings come from other major retailers or nowhere.
What we never do
No pay-to-rank. No sponsored placements dressed as picks. No 'editor's choice' badges sold to the highest bidder. No fabricated review counts, no invented owner sentiment for products whose owners we haven't read, and no burying a con because a brand is popular. The cons list is as load-bearing as the pros list on every unit.
How the site makes money
Amazon affiliate links. The 'Check price on Amazon' button on a unit's page earns us a small commission if you buy something after clicking it, at no extra cost to you — that's the whole business model, disclosed in the footer of every page. It changes nothing about the rankings: the same commission rate applies to every AC on Amazon, so we have no reason to favor one unit over another, and units Amazon doesn't sell keep their pages and their pros anyway. If the model ever changes, this page changes first.
Keeping it current
The catalog was last refreshed on August 13, 2026. Models get added, prices get corrected, and discontinued units get pulled as we notice them — and room ACs move fast enough in spring that a price here is a tier, not a quote. If something looks wrong, a dead model or a figure that doesn't match the manual, that's a data bug rather than an angle.