This article is more of a follow-up than a review. This is Eco Flow’s brand new 4,000 BTU portable air conditioner. I was waiting for the battery to come in, and it took a couple of weeks, but I finally got the battery.
I got it charged and decided to do some tests because everybody had questions. They wanted to know everything from the hose as to why didn’t I have it hooked up to the window to why I ran it off of an inverter and not a battery. So all those questions are going to be answered in this article. So I charged this battery up all the way, then I hooked this up to my window.
Performance Test on AC for EcoFlow Wave
I have a double-layer insulated thick cardboard with foam, and the setup uses their snapping connector on the back. The hoses are six inches and eight inches in diameter. I got many questions about the hose diameters and how they had to be mounted vertically. You can’t mount the cable sideways because the air conditioner would be sideways.
This setup isn’t perfect, but it was just for this performance test. I’m not going to leave this air conditioner in the window because I got an air conditioner built into the wall, but this was for testing purposes. You’ll be surprised how little power this thing ends up using.
I will not spoil it at this article’s early stage. You have to read the whole article to find out. After we kill the battery, we’ll go ahead and charge this battery up with solar. We’ll let it sit outside for five hours and find out how much battery we get back from a 200-watt panel because it is solar-chargeable.
We’re also going to find out how much it cools the room. So we’ll see how many degrees it brings down the room temperature. You guys want to know these answers, so let’s find out.
So for the record, we turned on the battery, and we will time how long the battery is going to last. The room temperature is 79 degrees, and the outside temperature is 84 degrees, so this should be quite a challenge for this battery-powered 4,000 BTU portable air conditioner. The room is 160 square feet and very well insulated.
I have a new argon-filled double pane window, completely sealed around new gaskets around the doors and a concrete slab underneath. We will adjust the temperature to 71 degrees, which would be a comfortable indoor temperature. We’ll go ahead and put the fan on maximum and see how well it cools down this room.
Remember, we’re starting at 79 degrees. I waited until later in the day. It’s about four o’clock, and it’s still pretty warm, but there’s no sun beating on the window. We started the time and EcoFlow Wave. We’re going to find out how long it runs on maximum. Do note that it says right there it’s going to run for 2.6 hours. How accurate is it? Will it run for two and a half hours off the full battery? Also, note that I kept the intake hoses as short as possible.
They’re not giving off very much heat; besides, they’re behind the curtain, so it shouldn’t affect the performance test very much. So we’ve got about two hours and 45 minutes on the battery, and that’s pretty good. EcoFlow Wave is a 4,000 BTU air conditioner that’s not that big of a battery.
So EcoFlow Wave is quite efficient on DC. The ambient temperature in the room is 72 degrees. So the room’s 160 square feet ceiling’s about eight feet tall, so it’s like 1300 cubic feet. I have approximately a ton, or at least three-quarters of a ton, of lithium batteries in the test room, combined with all the lithium solar generators I have in there, plus the concrete floor, which is a giant heat sink. You have to consider that there is a lot of mass in the room that likes to hold its temperature.
So the EcoFlow Wave brought the room’s temperature from 79 To 72 degrees in under three hours. That’s impressive for a portable battery-powered air conditioner.
Performance Test on DC Power for EcoFlow Wave
How efficient is this on DC power? We’ll only know by plugging it into a Delta Pro and seeing how it goes.
This air conditioner runs differently on DC than it does on AC. When you plug into AC, it’s like no holds are barred, and it maxes everything out. But if you have it on battery power, it says in the book it acts differently. It operates more efficiently.
I want to see how much more efficient it is on DC power. I’ve been running the EcoFlow Wave on maximum, and I’ll tell you what I mean by that. I’ve had the air conditioner running on maximum for about 8 minutes because I wanted to know if the numbers I’m seeing are correct.
It says 281, and it’s going back and forth to 284. That’s the number of watts in DC that the air conditioner uses on the maximum setting. I set the fan on low; it takes about 20 more power if you crank it up. It’s barely using around 300 watts. That’s significantly better than our AC test, which used 400 to 450 watts.
It says on the screen that the air conditioner will run on maximum, which means the compressor and fan are running for 11 hours, and that’s confirmed on the Delta Pro; that also says 11 for 11 hours. Of course, you can turn the fan down and get a little extra time. You can also get it to run much more if you increase the temperature.
EcoFlow Wave has a timer built in. Let’s say we want it to run for three hours and then automatically shut off. So I set it to three hours, and it goes into a different mode where it’ll try to be extra efficient on power. As I observed, it’s up to 12 hours of running time, so turning the timer on gave us a little extra power.
And it sounds like the compressor inside is winding down because it’s making a different sound than it was before with the timer off. EcoFlow does mention this in the manual. When you’re on battery power and running the timer, it goes into a special power-saving mode to extend the amount of time your air conditioner can run.
I also observed that the power has reduced to about 290 to 300 watts and is much quieter than it was. Then, the decibel range has undoubtedly gone down quite a bit. So if you want to know how long the timer can run on this, eight hours is the maximum. You could set this to run, say like, while you’re sleeping, and it will shut off in eight hours.
It is impressive that you have a 4,000 BTU running off less than 300 watts, so this is way more efficient than it was on AC Power. When we were running it on AC, it was about 400 to 450 watts. That’s typical for a wall unit like we have in our home, which is a 5,000 BTU, and when it’s cranking that compressor, it’ll do 400 to 425 watts.
For the EcoFlow Wave, the power usage floated around 400 to 450 watts, and this is a 4,000 BTU, but it was converting AC to DC to run a DC compressor. So there was a conversion loss, and, as I said previously, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was much more efficient on DC. Because it sends DC from the Delta Pro battery to the EcoFlow Wave air conditioner through the cable directly, there are no conversions.
It’s running directly off the battery, so it’s not doing that AC to DC thing, which usually wastes about 20% of the power. That is about what math works out to be. We are running 290 watts at maximum speed, saving more than a hundred watts.
It’s like 120 watts less power so you can run this thing a bit longer. It still says 13 hours on the screen, so one 3600-watt-hour Delta Pro Battery will run the EcoFlow Wave air conditioner for 13 hours. For those who say you can’t run an air conditioner on a battery, you’re mistaken on this. This setup isn’t even adding solar; imagine if you added solar. With a Delta Pro, you can add solar and extend this run time to run this air conditioner for free daily.
I’m only running this off the Delta Smart Battery because this thing is 30 pounds lighter. I can lift it and put it on the table without any problem. But the Delta Pro has the same battery in it. So by calculation, one battery can run the EcoFlow Wave for 13 hours. If you have the Delta Pro plus an extra battery, that’s 26 hours of constant air conditioning.
That’s 26 hours of running compressor time. That’s not 26 hours of run time because once your room gets to whatever temperature you want, the compressor will shut off, saving a lot of power. So when it says 13 hours on the screen, it’s double that because most of the time, EcoFlow Wave air conditioners will cycle about 50% if you have it set to a temperature.
Price for EcoFlow Wave
Please note this only works with Delta Pro, so you can’t use a Bluetti, EcoFlow Mini, or EcoFlow River. So it has to be the Delta, the Delta Pro, or the Smart Battery. You can get these separately, so they had this air conditioner package with a Delta product. I complained to them about this.
What they did was they put their EcoFlow Wave packaged with the Delta Pro, so the total cost it’s like four grand. People were blowing their minds to know that the EcoFlow Wave air conditioner is $4,000. The EcoFlow Wave is $1199 without the battery; you don’t need the battery if you get a Delta product.
If you get EcoFlow Wave, you could skip the battery. The battery makes it portable, so you can carry it around and get three hours of air conditioning. But this setup is much more practical if you keep it in one place. So what’s the takeaway here? Absolutely. Run this air conditioner off of DC power.
I wouldn’t bother buying this to plug it into a wall or to plug it into a non-Delta product. Either get the battery that you can get. Air conditioner and run it off of DC and solar or get a Delta Pro or one of the EcoFlow Delta products. Get it in the bundle, which will save you some money and be lighter.
Overall Performance of EcoFlow Wave
Overall, EcoFlow Wave runs super efficiently. We’re down to 270 watts, and it’s still blowing ice cold. The screen still says 13 hours of run time. I’ve been running this for like 15 minutes, and it’s only used 1% of the battery. So it is a very efficient and thumbs-up product.
Comparison of EcoFlow Wave Versus Standard Air Conditioner
Let’s compare it with a standard air conditioner, a straight-up old-school, completely mechanical, with no digital controls, and a 5,000 BTU air conditioner. It’s small, and I used to have the AC in my RV. When it’s running on full, this is high with maximum compressor. It requires about 415 to 420 watts, and that’s direct AC wall power.
If you tried to run this off of an inverter, you could add 20%. So that’s a big difference to the EcoFlow Wave as it has a DC compressor, which makes it way more efficient. So this will run 4,000 BTUs at a low 300-watt range directly from a battery, not from an inverter. If you run it from an inverter, it’s a lot less efficient.
If you run the cheap Walmart AC from an inverter, you can expect to burn 500 to 550 watts. So you’re saving 200 watts by going DC.
Solar Panel Test and Performance with EcoFlow Wave
I have a 200 Watt solar panel plugged directly into the EcoFlow Wave. We’re going to go ahead and see how much battery we get. We’ll see if it will charge the battery as it has been charging in the sun with the 200 Watt solar panel for approximately five hours. I started at eleven in the morning and until three in the afternoon. It is still on bar number two of four. The reality is that solar charging with only 200 watts isn’t practical.
It would be OK to assist the battery, but it will only work for a short-term solution. You would need to use a Delta Pro or Delta Max to pump a lot of solar into the EcoFlow Wave. The results of the solar test are I got two out of four lights.
I directly plugged a 200 Wat solar panel into the battery and ran it for five hours in perfect sun conditions. It’s pretty hot, but the sky is entirely blue, not a cloud in the sky. Only two lights in five hours mean you’re not going to charge this thing up in one solar day, or you can also buy the EcoFlow Delta. A little more expensive, of course. The Delta Mini does not have the DC output, so you can’t run EcoFlow Wave on it.
Of course, you can plug it into the AC and use the inverter, which defeats the whole purpose of this air conditioner. If you plug this in the AC wall power, buy a Walmart a hundred dollars air conditioner because you’re not going to see any benefit running this off of AC power, although you can.
You’ll use more power, like 450 watts versus the low 300 watts, than running it on DC, so it makes more sense. If you’re going to spend that kind of money, run it off a DC source like the Delta Pro, the Delta Pro Smart Battery, or the Delta Max.
My Verdict on EcoFlow Wave
The air conditioner EcoFlow Wave alone is only $1199. It is still too expensive. Well, maybe it is, but the competition costs more than this, and their air conditioner is only 2300 BTUs. I have the ZERO BREEZE Mark 2, so I can compare these two. I just never did the final review on it because I was doing some testing, and then some issues happened, so I never finished that review, but I ran that air conditioner for several months in the window upstairs.
I know exactly how it performs, how long it lasts, and how much power it has. EcoFlow Wave per BTU uses less power and has a longer run time than the ZERO BREEZE Mark 2. Both models cost about the same, probably around a $100 difference between the two, so EcoFlow Wave is a much better buy.
Remember, EcoFlow Wave is a fully portable air conditioner DC compressor. You can carry it around and run it on a battery; otherwise, the hundred dollars Walmart units can’t do that. If you run hundred-dollar Walmart units off an inverter, you can expect it will take 500 plus watts, while EcoFlow Wave will use 300 plus watts.
It’s a massive difference in power when you’re running off of DC. So this is where you’re spending your money, which has a three-year warranty. With that Walmart air conditioner, you get a one-year warranty. I know because I bought three. I know they only come with a one-year warranty. If somebody is in the market for something portable like this, you can use it in a camper van or RV tent. You can take it anywhere and don’t have to hook it up outside.
You know you can leave it in a room and have a bloke of cold air on you if that’s all you want. You have to understand it’s $1199 without the battery. Then they have a bundle with the battery. However, this is probably a better bargain if you buy the EcoFlow Wave without the battery and get an EcoFlow Max.
Yes, it’s more expensive, but if you’re looking to save the most amount of power possible, say you’re off-grid, or you’re boondocking, this is going to be the best way to go, and that’s why they put those bundles at the top of the screen. It makes more sense because they’re still portable units, and that battery will give you a lot more run time.
Thank you for reading my review of the EcoFlow Wave. That’s it for now, till next time