I’ve had several scam adverts recently for supposedly ground-breaking
air conditioners.
The ads are very professionally put together and could
easily fool a lot of people. There aren’t the usual typos and grammatical
errors and dubious email addresses. The air conditioners are said to be
super-effective. They’re about the size of a bread bin, you just plug them into
a power socket and hey presto, the room is cool in about 60 seconds.
A lot of Brits could be the ideal customers for them, with
UK temperatures soaring into the thirties Celsius, and few homes having air conditioning
already. Around 90 per cent of USA households have air conditioning, while the
figure for UK homes is only around 15 per cent. The USA has long ago assumed
scorching summers and provided for them.
But one golden rule for detecting scams is that if something
seems too good to be true, then it probably is.
Up to now our house hasn’t needed air conditioning because
it stays fairly cool in summer temperatures that are usually no higher than the
twenties Celsius. But with climate breakdown pushing temperatures up, air
conditioning might become a necessity in a few years’ time.
Funny that!
ReplyDeleteWe stayed at an Airbnb in Missouri In May and it was rather warm when we got there. As soon as we got inside, we realized it was too warm and started looking for the controls for the air-conditioning. Couldn’t find them.
Looked at the listing for the Airbnb and, sure enough, it was supposed to include air-conditioning. However, there was none.
What they thought was air-conditioning was just a super fancy fan that just blew the air around inside whatever room it was in.
We contacted the host and she, after we explained what we had, called her maintenance guy to install a window air conditioner. (That was another story.)
An air conditioner has to have some way to “dump“ the heat outside somehow. A box that just sits on a table or in a corner of a room can’t do that.
To be fair, this was a relatively new Airbnb listing and the four or so previous customers had been there on days that were much, much cooler so there would have been no need for air-conditioning.