Air Conditioning
Buy and sell fans, air conditioners and dehumidifiers in Panama.
David and Volcán share a province, yet a house in each needs different machines. In David a split earns its keep most nights; up in Volcán few homes bother with one, and a small dehumidifier in the closet keeps mould off shoes through the wet months. New and pre-owned units for both climates are listed here, from a window unit for one hot bedroom to a damp-rated ceiling fan for a terrace or a filter purifier for a dusty flat. Decide first whether the room’s trouble is heat, damp or dust, because each machine deals with only one of them.
Splits in David and closet dehumidifiers in Volcán:
heat and damp are separate problems, and only a machine with a compressor takes heat out of a room. Wall splits, window units and portables do it, and all three are under air conditioning units. A fan does not lower the temperature at all; it moves air across your skin, often enough in a lowland bedroom at night, and ceiling, pedestal and tower models are under fans. A dehumidifier pulls water out of the air and gives off a little warmth while it works, so it does nothing for a hot room. In the highlands, or in any closet kept shut, it is what saves leather bags and shoes, and some houses up there have a closet drain to the outside for one. An air purifier does neither job: it pushes room air through a filter that catches dust and smoke.
Blade span on a ceiling fan, a compressor in a dehumidifier:
a ceiling fan is sold by its span from tip to tip, and long blades suit a living room while a short span keeps a small bedroom from feeling like a wind tunnel. A DC motor costs more and uses a fraction of the power, and only a damp-rated fan belongs on an open terrace. A dehumidifier is rated by the water it lifts in a day: a compressor unit will dry a whole room; the small thermoelectric boxes sold for closets pull so little that they are fine behind a shut wardrobe door and useless in a bedroom. With a purifier, match its clean-air delivery rate, the CADR, to the size of the room, and look for true HEPA on the filter rather than “HEPA-type”, which promises nothing.
A pedestal fan and a bedroom split on the electricity bill:
what a machine costs to run matters more here than what it costs to buy. An 18-inch pedestal fan is around $25 to $50 new and draws about 70 watts; a bedroom split draws something near a thousand while its compressor runs. Left on eight hours a night for a month, the fan adds roughly $3 to the bill and the split somewhere around $35 to $60, at the top of that range in a home already billed at the dearer rates. Cheap new fans leave a used pedestal fan worth very little; the used ones worth driving for are DC ceiling fans, which cost several times as much new.
A wobbling ceiling fan or a dehumidifier that never fills its tank:
those are the faults a listing tends to leave out. Run a ceiling fan on top speed first. A wobble usually means a bent blade bracket or a lost balancing weight, a hum points to the motor or its capacitor, and a dead remote can mean the receiver hidden in the canopy has failed. A dehumidifier is a small refrigeration machine: in a humid room the coil should turn cold and water should start dripping into the tank before long. One that runs and collects nothing has lost its gas, and that repair costs more than the unit is worth. On a purifier, find out whether the replacement filter is still made; without one the machine ends up as a fan in a box.
Ceiling fans taken down and a dehumidifier packed for a move:
most of these come up at a move, and a family going up from David to Volcán has a split it will not need and a dehumidifier still to find. Copy the wattage off the label, because buyers here think about the bill before the price. For a ceiling fan add the blade span, whether the motor is DC, and whether the downrod, canopy and remote are in the box; for a dehumidifier, its daily rating and whether it has a hose outlet for continuous draining. And keep the remote with the fan: a ceiling-fan receiver usually answers only its own handset, and whoever comes to collect will want to see it spin before it goes into the car.