De’Longhi Pinguino 100 Silent

Verdict

Easy to use and very powerful, the De’Longhi Pinguino 100 Silent also has a high A++ efficiency rating, so it’s about as cheap to run as is possible. I found that it cooled my office down fast and efficiently, and my only complaint is that there’s no way to turn the screen off.

Introduction

You want two things from a portable air conditioner: the ability to lower the temperature of a room to make it feel comfortable and running costs as low as possible.

The De’Longhi Pinguino 100 provides these two things, along with simple operation and its clever Real Feel Technology that gives you a set-and-forget cooling option.

Design and features

• Simple remote control
• Lots of options for the vent
• Can’t turn  the screen off

Designed for rooms up to 100m³ and with a 10000BTU output, the De’Longhi Pinguino 100 is great for larger rooms. You do have to consider how much sun hits the room, but for all but the biggest rooms that are south-facing, this model should do the job.

The size of compressor does mean that the De’Longhi Pinguino 100 is quite large. Weighing 30kg, and measuring 81 x 45 x 39cm, it needs a fair amount of room, and it’s quite heavy.

It is nicely designed, though. There’s a remote control in the box, which doubles up on all of the controls avialable on the front, which drops into the storage holder on top of the unit itself.

De’Longhi provides many accessories in the box, including an adjustable mount for sash windows and a through-the-wall adaptor if you fancy making the installation a little more permanent. If you’ve got casement windows, you can just drop the hose out of the window, although depending on the size of the window, you might want an adaptor kit to create a better seal and prevent warm air from coming back in.

Operation of the De’Longhi Pinguino 100 is simple, and it can operate in fan-only mode, which I didn’t find particularly useful; dehumidifier mode; and air-con mode. There’s then a choice of three fan speeds, although the Auto mode is probably the most useful, as the fan speed is adjusted on the fly, based on the cooling required.

It’s also useful using the oscillation mode, which blows air out at different angles, helping circulation. You can fix the angle if you want to direct the cool air directly at you.

This air conditioner also has the clever Real Feel mode. This is a one-hit function that balances temperature and humidity, adjusting the compressor and fan speed automatically to keep comfortable settings.

There’s a display on the front that shows the current comfort level: orange is not comfortable; green is almost there; and blue is there. In blue mode, the air conditioner will shut down, turning back on when humidity or temperature levels aren’t right.

This mode is useful for general comfort, but you might want to set a target temperature if you want to get a room to a specific level. For example, it can be useful to cool down a bedroom before you sleep so that the air-con unit can be turned off during the night.

There is a silent mode, which reduces noise output, at the expense of cooling capacity. It’s not particularly silent; I didn’t use this mode and just went for the power cooling, trusting the air-con unit to turn off when the target temperature was reached.

For night use, there’s a timer that will turn the De’Longhi Pinguino 100 off automatically, available in 30-minute increments from 0.5-hours to nine hours, and then hourly increments up to 24 hours.

It is a shame that the screen can’t be turned off, for night mode, when you really don’t need to see the target temperature (the current temperature is not displayed).

Performance

• Excellent efficiency
• Cools fast
• Not too noisy

An A++-rated appliance, the De’Longhi Pinguino 100 is about as efficient as you can get for a portable AC unit. De’Longhi rates it as having 700W input power and a cooling capacity of 2.5kW. That’s 357% efficient – a Coefficient Of Performance (COP) of 3.57.

I measured the De’Longhi Pinguino 100 using around 640W when running at maximum with the compressor turned on, which means a cost of around 15.6p per hour running at full blast. However, as the unit shuts down once it reaches temperature, the De’Longhi Pinguino 100 won’t need to run on full power all of the time, and the higher you set the target temperature, the lower the running cost will be.

Testing in my south-facing garden office, which gets very hot, I found that the De’Longhi Pinguino 100 reduced the temperature from 31.5°C to 26°C in just an hour, which felt much more comfortable. Turning the unit off, the temperature only climbed a little afterwards, maintaining a comfortable environment with no further power required.

A typical cooling session required around 0.58kWh of power, so around 14.21p.

The thermostat seems to be about right. I used an external temperature sensor and found that the De’Longhi Pinguino 100 Silent turned off when the air temperature was close to the target temperature that I’d set.

Cooling performance is impressive. Measuring once the unit had reduced my office to 24°C (which only took another 30-minutes from 26°C), I found that the De’Longhi Pinguino 100 could output air at 10.5°C (a 14.5°C reduction), which demonstrates how it can cool so rapidly. Measuring the output when my office was 28°C, I got a reading of 12.9°C (a 15.1°C reduction)

The fan speed, measured at the unit’s output, varied between 3.2m/sec on low, 3.8m/sec on medium, and 4.9m/sec on the highest setting. With the compressor being the loud part, I measured all three modes at 55.5dB, which is very quiet; the compact EcoFlow Wave 2 comes in at 60.3dB on maximum. Silent mode was still 51.6dB, which isn’t a huge amount quieter.

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