How to Extend a Portable Air Conditioner Hose

If you need to cool down a room, but have no convenient way to vent your cooling unit, you may want to know how to extend a portable air conditioner hose to vent over a larger distance than what is provided for by the standard air conditioner hose included with your unit. Before you continue with this project, it is important to understand that there are various pitfalls to extending the hose of your portable air conditioning unit. In some cases, you will have no other option but to extend your exhaust hose yourself. If this is the case, the steps below will provide you with the proper procedure for doing so.

Step 1: Understanding Portable Air Conditioning Units

Unlike window air conditioners or other types of air conditioners that are at least partially outside, portable air conditioning units will typically be positioned entirely within one room of your house. Portable air conditioning units work by sucking warm air out of the rooms of your house and then venting them outside of your home. If your portable air conditioning unit is not able to vent this warm air outside, the unit will not be able to cool down your home effectively.

Step 2: Precautions

Before making the decision to extend the length of your portable air conditioning unit's exhaust hose, it will be important to fully understand the potential pitfalls of this project. Portable air conditioning units typically come standard with 5-foot to 7-foot-long exhaust hoses. This is the standard length of exhaust hose and the length that most portable air conditioning units are designed to push air. Extending the length of your portable air conditioning unit's exhaust hose can potentially cause problems with back pressure, which can make your portable air conditioning unit run less efficiently or even break the unit completely.

Before extending the length of your exhaust hose, carefully read through your unit's warranty to see what will occur if your unit is damaged in this way. In many cases, extending the length of your portable air conditioning unit's exhaust hose will void the warranty of that unit and leave you without recourse if your unit breaks.

Step 3: Increase Diameter of Exhaust Hose

The most important thing that must be remembered when increasing the length of your exhaust hose is that you need to avoid creating back pressure at all costs. The best way to do this is to steadily increase the diameter of the exhaust hose as you move away from the unit itself. At a hardware store, you should be able to find lengths of flex hose of different diameters and connectors for connecting these lengths to one another. If you do have to extend the length of your exhaust hose, just be sure to never extend the length to more than 12 feet, as anything more than this will almost certainly damage your air conditioning unit.