Last year I wrote a blog article about a Miracle Amish Heater that generated a ton of traffic. I was even interviewed by the New York Times as a result of that article. Well, the company that brought us the Amish Heat Surge is at it again, and this time they are doing something even more despicable. They are misleading customers in their ads about a new cooler that uses ‘96% less energy than a window air conditioner’. There’s good reason it uses so much less energy than a window air conditioner, and that’s because it only has about 7% of the cooling capacity of a typical window air conditioner.
The $300 product is called the ‘Cool Surge‘ and it uses ‘glacier packs’ that you freeze and then load into the device so that a fan can blow air over the packs and presumably cool the room. Well, there’s only one problem with that approach and that is that device will actually make your house hotter, not cooler! Why? Because the energy it takes to freeze the ice packs comes from your refrigerator which exhausts the heat it removes from the water into your home. They conveniently forgot to mention this in their advertising. In fact, they say that the unit can’t be measured with a BTU rating. That is complete nonsense.
The BTU rating of this so-called cooler is absolutely minuscule compared with even a small window air conditioner. A small 5000 BTU/hr window air conditioner produces the equivalent cooling to melting about 35 lbs. of ice per hour. This cooler holds 12 lbs. of ice total. That’s about 1.5 gallons. Think about the volume of 1.5 gallons of water. You’ll be using a large portion of the space in your freezer to continually re-freeze these glacier packs. Assuming you swapped out these packs every 4 to 6 hours, which is how long they last according to the website, this device would have only about 7% of the capacity to cool a room as a window air conditioner. And, don’t forget, freezing the packs simultaneously puts all the heat removed from the water (and then some) into your home. There’s a good reason that air conditioners need to be vented to the outdoors. It’s because they need a place to dump the heat that they remove from inside your house. You cannot cool a house with a closed system like this.
I wish I could talk with the engineers who dream up these scam products just to see what they are thinking. I cannot imagine how they sleep at night because they are swindling their customers and the worst part is they must know it.
We purchased the large stand up fireplace (Heat Surge) in 2015. Last year we purchased a small version as it had something new and better in it. BUT we could keep our original stand up fireplace and we could get the smaller and improve one for $100 and some odd dollars, which we did. I have now received a letter with another improved Heart Surge which keeps you warm in winter and a special fan to keep your home cool in summer. I will receive $233.00 rebate toward this newer small Heat Surge and all I have to send them is $159.00 and it will be sent right out. The $159. will be added to the $233. rebate to pay for this newer one. And this tells me this newer small ones total would equal $392.00 .