Cool yourself down without breaking your wallet – Close Comfort COOL FOCUS Review

Close Comfort COOL FOCUS Review – While Summer is practically over here in Australia, we still get really sunny days even in Melbourne. We have a double-storey house and our main bedroom is facing West, so we do get warm and hot nights every now and then. While we have the Brivis refrigerated cooling to cool the whole floor down, at around 5-6kWh, it is not a cheap solution to run continuously.

So if you wish you can have something to cool you down throughout the night without having to break your wallet, you might want to take a look at the Close Comfort COOL FOCUS I’m reviewing today.

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Close Comfort COOL FOCUS is a portable air conditioner with just 300 Watts of power, compared to the 5,000 Watts of our refrigerated cooling solution. So for example, if we have to pay 30c per kWh, running the refrigerated cooling for an hour will cost us: 5kWh * 30c = $1.50. If it runs through the whole night for 7 hours, that’ll cost us 7 x $1.50 = $10.50 per night! If you have a reverse split system, it’s probably about half the cost, depending on the power.

If something like the COOL FOCUS is used, it’d cost us 0.3kWh * 30c = $0.09 per hour! If it runs through the whole night for 7 hours, that’d cost us 7 x $0.09 = $0.63 per night. HUGE difference.

Now, of course, you can’t compare this apple to apple. The Close Comfort COOL FOCUS is more like a personal cooling solution, i.e it cools you down directly with a cold breeze, but it’s never meant to be used to cool the whole room down. According to Close Comfort, it can create a cool zone up to 4-5 square metres. Personally, I found it great to cool up to 2 people down (my wife and I) sleeping on a Double Bed. It has also accompanied me many times at my Study area during hot & warm nights.

While I said that Close Comfort COOL FOCUS is portable, it is not exactly lightweight. At 17kg, you probably don’t want to carry this up and down the stairs all the time. It has wheels, thankfully, but they are quite small and it’s still a bit of challenge dragging the unit on our thick and heavily carpeted area upstairs. But you can technically carry it to travel with you using the carrying bag and that because it works with batteries, solar with suitable inverter (not supplied), and small generators. If you like to go camping, on a boat, caravan, etc, this is a perfect solution for sure.

The unit itself has 3 mode of operations: Low, Medium, and High – and noise gets higher as you go higher speed. I usually put it at Medium and never had trouble sleeping with the noise. It’d take around 90 seconds after the machine starts up before you can feel the cold breeze coming from it – and boy, it is nicely cold! You can also set the desired temperature through the included remote control. All operations must be done using the remote though, even for just turning the machine on and off.

It has no huge pipe to direct the hot air out. The good thing about it is that the machine is simple to use and easy to carry. The bad side, I guess, is that the hot air will be expelled directly from the back of the unit straight to the ceiling. You can practically place it next to your open door or window, but I find that it never really makes our bedroom hotter than it is. Or if it does, it doesn’t really matter much because what I feel is the cold breeze while I sleep. According to Close Comfort, the total warming is the same as having 3 people chatting together in the room which sounds like a minimal effect.

The air is filtered and I don’t feel the dryness of air after the machine runs the whole night. I usually use the included Focus Enhancer accessory to extend the range of the cooling and to enable higher angle of the air flow to our bed.

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Close Comfort COOL FOCUS Review Conclusion

With adjustable speed, temperature, angle of flow, and a sleep timer, Close Comfort COOL FOCUS is an economical & effective cooling solution for your home and outdoor. The cold breeze is on par with a breeze from a reverse split system, but at a smaller scale and shorter range. The COOL FOCUS is made to cool people and not rooms but with just 300W power, it is perfectly affordable to run the machine throughout the night while you sleep for less than a dollar.

Unlike the Evapolar evaSMART where you have to replace the cartridge at some point (and they aren’t cheap), COOL FOCUS has no consumables – apart from the filters that you may have to clean after some time.

While it’s not the lightest, the COOL FOCUS can be carried with you to a place where it’s going to be hot such as a campsite or a yacht. Assuming you have an external power to run it, you’ll be pampered with a cold breeze all day and throughout the night while you sleep.

At AU$699, it is definitely not the cheapest portable air conditioner out there, but other brands I know of are 3-6kW unit (compared to COOL FOCUS’ 0.3kW). If you only need a cooling solution to help you sleep or work at the desk, it will definitely be economical to grab the COOL FOCUS in the long run.

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Disclosure: Close Comfort COOL FOCUS review sample was supplied for reviewing but all opinions are mine and not paid