Airconditioning Units
Buy and sell air conditioning units in Panama.
Two splits of the same make and age can be worth very different money depending on where they hung. One that spent its life on a balcony in Coronado has breathed salt every day, while one from a bedroom in Las Cumbres may still have fins as clean as the day it went up. Wall splits, inverter and the older fixed-speed kind, are listed here alongside window units, portables and the ceiling-suspended units that cool shops, new and pre-owned. Ask where the outdoor unit was mounted, and for a photo of its label, before you talk price.
Inverter and fixed-speed wall splits:
most of what gets listed is a wall split, with the compressor out on the wall and a slim unit above the bed. An inverter slows down once the room is cool and holds it there, quieter and easier on the bill for a unit that runs all night. A fixed-speed split switches fully on and off, costs less and has no control board for a power surge to burn out. For a room used an hour in the evening, the cheaper one is no mistake; for a bedroom cooled every night, the inverter pays its way.
When a window unit, a portable or a ceiling-suspended unit makes more sense:
a window unit needs no technician, which suits a rental where the landlord will not have holes drilled for pipes. A portable vents through a hose out of the window, but it cools noticeably less than a split of the same rating and is louder, because the compressor is in the room with you. Ceiling-suspended units hang above the counters of shops, small eateries and open-plan offices. Evaporative coolers only blow damp air and are not air conditioners. If moving air is enough, fans cost far less to buy and to run; if the trouble is mould in a room that stays shut, dehumidifiers deal with it without cooling anything.
The portable against a basic bedroom split:
a 12,000 BTU portable costs around $300 new, more than a fixed-speed split of the same rating at a little over $200. The portable saves the installation, usually $120 to $160 for a bedroom split, then loses on cooling and noise every night. The premium inverter lines from Panasonic, LG or Samsung cost more than twice the basic split, and those are the used units worth hunting: one a few years old, taken off an inland wall with its coil intact, can cost less than a new budget split and still be the better machine.
Coated coils for a house within reach of the sea:
on the coast the outdoor unit dies first. Salt on the wind pits the thin aluminium fins until the coil underneath leaks gas. Some makers coat the coil against it, LG as Gold Fin, Daikin and several others with the blue-tinted Blue Fin, and for a house in Coronado or Pedasí that coating matters more than a better efficiency rating. On a used unit, look at the fins first. If they crumble when brushed, the coil carries a white powder or the base pan of a window unit has rusted through, the sea has already decided how long it will last.
Switching on a used split before you pay for it:
ask for it to be running when you arrive. Within a few minutes the vents should blow clearly colder than the room, the compressor should start without a bang and the display should show no error code. Frost on the copper pipes points to low gas or a choked filter, oily stains at the joints to a slow leak, water dripping indoors to a blocked drain line. Then read the refrigerant on the label. Current units run on R-32 or R-410A; R-22, the gas in older ones, is being phased out and gets dearer at every top-up, so value an R-22 split only for the years it has left.
Photos and details for a split you are replacing:
give the brand, the BTU rating, inverter or fixed-speed, the refrigerant and the year it went in, then say where the outdoor unit lived and how often it was serviced. A close photo of clean condenser fins answers the salt question before anyone asks it. Say whether the unit is still on the wall and who will recover the gas and take it down, because buyers price that job in. A window unit or a portable can go home in a car, but it should travel upright and stand for a few hours before it is switched on, so the compressor oil settles.