The best air coolers for your home: eight energy-saving alternatives to aircon, tested

They’re cheaper and greener than air conditioning, but which evaporative cooler impressed us most?

• The best fans to keep you cool, tested

Air coolers are not the same thing as air conditioning. Rather than extracting moisture from the air to cool your room down by multiple degrees, evaporative coolers use water to cool the air they blow towards you – like a sea breeze taking the edge off summer heat – and they use a fraction of the electricity of air con.

A typical portable air conditioner uses 1,000W (watts) of electricity (costing about 26p an hour to run, based on the current price cap). By comparison, the evaporative coolers I tested use between 26W and 87W; you could run my favourite model, the Swan Nordic (26W), for 38 hours and it would still use less electricity than a single air con unit running for an hour.

Best air cooler overall:
Swan Nordic air cooler

Best budget air cooler:
JML Chillmax Air Tower Plus