LG 8,000 BTU Window Air Conditioner, 115V

I bought 3 of the LG 8000s total, as well as two very expensive Friedrich Kuhl heat pumps to replace a large Lennox Central Heat Pump that failed after 25 years of service… so here is a very long winded review, covering all three of those pretty much. I’ll put the info about the LG first for those of you who want only the bare bones of the story, then follow up with the entire documentary. 🙂

FIRST POINT:
The LG units are easy to install, even though they do REQUIRE an outside support, bought or made.
They are inexpensive to buy at certain times of the year, but my Friedrich units EACH cost 5 times as much or more! I am much happier with the LG than the expensive Friedrich so far, even though I have to use space heaters in those rooms in wintertime. My only regret is that I did not get LG units that included a heat panel to help heat the larger rooms. I am considering when the Friedrich units bite the dust, replacing them with 10K 230V LG units with heat panels for the larger rooms. The 115V heat panels can’t heat any better than a cheap space heater and at 230V you can heat twice the area.

MORE EFFICENT AND LESS ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN:
Uses R-32 coolant which I understand to be less threatening and more efficient. Additionally it has a rotary compressor which is quieter and and more economical to operate. Various coolants get different opinions expressed depending on what article you read, so I can’t verify this information.

LESS NOISE:
The LG is quieter overall. The big Friedrichs do have quiet fans on LOW and will blow so hard on HIGH that you will think you have a commercial pedestal fan blowing on you. But the Friedrich compressors are LOUD and make strange sounds sometimes… even in the middle of the night they rattle and shut down with a shocking clunk sometimes, and occasionally make a noise like someone sneezing loudly and a scary HISS when the compressor cuts off. The LG just comes on and goes off, no big deal. I don’t know much about the rotary compressor, but you can’t even hear it go on and off unless you have the fan on low speed. I’m sure that if you went to the same trouble I did to mount it in a window or through the wall, it would be almost as quiet as a mini-split unit.

COOLS WELL, EFFICIENTLY:
Measuring my LG in comparison to my 10,000 BTU 115V smaller Friedrich, it burns half the electricity to cool the same area. I know because I had to use one of the LG units in there for a month while I was battling Friedrich service centers to fix that unit. I measured their power usage under multiple conditions with my Kill-A-Watt power tester. Yes the LG does come on a little more often to do the job, but still burns less power in a week overall.

LG IS NOT AS HEAVY DUTY:
But it is also not as heavy in weight… much easier to put in and take out. Some of the knobs and switches and deflectors are a little flimsy, but if you treat them with respect, you shouldn’t have problems… time will confirm that, I’m sure. But the one major point here is that the chassis is not as strong and without the outside support bracket (or the cheap-skate version in my photo) there have been reports of the chassis warping to allow fans to rub and make a lot of noise. Plan for that and you’ll be satisfied.

FANS ARE NOT AS POWERFUL:
The LG blows about as much in high speed as the Friedrich blows in medium speed. I don’t use the high speed in the bedrooms of course, but if you are trying to cool two rooms with a single unit, you might wish you had more powerful blowers.

FAR LESS COMPLICATED:
The Friedrich Kuhl models have very complex controls, especially on the remote. You can program them to do all sorts of schedules to turn them on and off, but all of that proved silly to me. Easier to just set the LG and forget it. All of the various modes of the Friedrich end up with you dinking around with the controls far more than the LG units. Plus both of my Friedrichs have trouble maintaining the set temperature, not because of capacity, but because the sensors don’t work properly and I have to compensate by several degrees, which is even more trouble due to the heating function.

WAY LESS EXPENSIVE TO BUY:
The Friedrich units were about 5 times the price of the LG units. Do I expect them to last 5 times as long? In a word NO. Also to consider is that the Friedrichs each weigh 110 pounds, and that will kill you when you have to remove it to take it for service.

MY DIY SUPPORT:
You can buy the LG outside supports and they are not that expensive, or you can use the less attractive DIY system in my photo. Two scraps of fiber cement plank and a length of 2X4 and you can fine-tune the slant of the unit by simply tilting the 2X4 slightly with a level on top of the unit.

MY DETAILED STORY:

We have had a Lennox central heatpump for the past 25 years which lost it’s ability to heat a few years ago and then the cooling function died at the end of last summer. That was a great heat pump, obviously, and though it lasted a very long time, it was not all that efficient due primarily to the big lie that’s told by the central system sellers who always fail to mention that you have to cool/heat the whole house in order to make the system work properly. Central systems require the air to flow as designed in EVERY room for the system to work properly, and frankly, not many people need to cool the whole house 24/7.

For just two people, unless we have guests, three of our bedrooms are empty every day, entered only very occasionally to clean up or get something. The doors are always closed. Sadly, if you close off the vents in those rooms, it affects the efficiency and longevity of the overall unit.

When the Lennox died, I had estimators come and even with the house already having central ducting, the estimates ranged from $6500 to double that, and not one of those guys offered anything near the quality of the Lennox unit.

I first thought I’d like to get the modern “mini-split” units, but this turned out not to be practical either from an installation standpoint or for overall cost of installation. The price for that turned out to be more than for a new central system, but each of the estimators declined because some of the rooms had no good place outside to put the compressor. So I started looking at window or through the wall units.

But in considering going to window units (or through the wall), there are many points to think about:

1. They are more noisy. The compressor is right there with the blowing portion, so you will hear that compressor each time it comes on. Larger units make more noise, and that’s just logical.
2. Large units are expensive and heavy, and if you need warranty service or repairs later, some service companies will NOT come to your house to even look at them… you’ll have to take the unit out and haul it to the repair shop. This could be a good thing or a bad thing… read on please.
3. Smaller units are less expensive, lighter, easier to install and replace.
4. By installing individual units in each room, you get full control over the temperature in each room, rather than having to cool rooms that are never used. Your guests will have control over their own bedroom, which they will appreciate if they like a warm room and you like a cool room or vice versa. Of course this also means you can turn any of the units off to save electricity.
5. Last but a very important point is, when a central a/c system breaks, the whole house is broken. With a window unit, you only have one room in trouble, and you don’t have to wait days or weeks to get someone to come and look at it, order parts, then come back to fix it… you just pull it out of the window and take it to the repair shop, or pop in another unit, either new or borrowed from another room. In my experience, having the repairman come to the house multiple times to fix our big Lennox, it would have actually been cheaper to buy a new window unit than the high cost for repairs.

So, I did decide to get a mix of window and through the wall units and install them myself. The cost of the units totaled out to about the same as the lowest bid for a central unit UNinstalled, but that brand had so many bad reviews I just couldn’t consider buying it. I decided to buy two very high priced Heat Pumps to take care of the areas we use every day and then 3 of these LG 8000 gems to do the seldom used bedrooms. I now wish I’d bought the LG units for the whole house. It would have been cheaper initially and would probably have worked better. I bought Friedrich Kuhl heat pumps at a total cost of about $2500 and installed them myself. They are VERY loud, but also very efficient… but there were problems. Each of them weighed twice as much as the LG units, so it was horrible trying to put them into the places (both required windows to be removed and bolstered to handle the weight, which was too much for the window to support on its own). Plus of course one of them required wiring for 220 volts. One of the Friedrich units did not work properly at first and I had to pull it back out of the wall and haul it 65 miles to get “service” because they “don’t allow their boys to take them out of the wall”. So this 76 year old man and his hundred pound wife had to do it for them. I took it to the warranty repair place and had to leave it because they didn’t have time to look at it in front of me. I waited nearly a week and called them back and was told there is nothing wrong with the unit (which cooled like a Texas Norther, but did not stop cooling… would freeze you out). I told them I would come and show them the problem, but when I got there, they’d all taken the afternoon off, and the receptionist wanted to CHARGE ME MONEY for testing the “good” unit. In all that brand new unit took a month to get going, many phone calls and emails, trips to two different cities.

So no, I will never again buy a central unit OR a big window unit. The little LG 8000 is the perfect a/c because it is light enough for us to lift it and if I have trouble I can’t fix, only one room is out of service, and I can actually swap units with another room if important. In fact I can toss the thing in the dump and buy another one cheaper than some of the repairs I’ve had on big units.

CONCLUSION:
It almost brings tears to my eyes thinking about my father so many years ago deciding he had to air condition this 100+ year old farm house. He had to have the venting put into the attic, additional wiring installed, and then picked the very best central unit he could find, which involved a large loan to be paid out of his Social Security and small pension… resulting in a lean on the house title. He could have installed window air conditioners with considerably less expense and only used many of the units when there were guests present, as I do. The extra safety factor of having many small units (all the same) is a huge relief, because when one goes down, you just borrow a unit from one of the spare rooms until the broken unit is repaired or replaced.

Obviously I fully recommend the LG, but do make sure you buy or make a support for the outside.

ABOUT THE PHOTOS: These were taken late last summer (2016) while I had it installed in the livingroom for a month. It was pretty much just stuck in that window while the big Friedrich was having warranty issues.

Very good for this price

I was surprised at the quality of the LG LW6017R 6,000 BTU unit. I used it to take the edge off a hot summer and it performed perfectly. I bought it because of its low rated power consumption – I could barely see a difference in my electric bill. I was very pleased.

So far so good. Works great. Looks great (relative to others). Installed easily. Cools nicely. Just in time for summer. I am impressed with Amazon’s speed and convenience of delivery. I don’t normally think of buying something like this through Amazon but when I went to Home Hardware and Home Depot, neither had the variety of air conditioners in stock that I needed. Amazon on the other hand had the widest variety allowing me to buy exactly what I wanted so I bought through them and had it in two days.