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As the weather heats up, the trappings of summer arrive with it: swimsuits, mosquitoes, and, naturally, portable air conditioning.
Go-anywhere AC is now a thing, and in fact, I’ve been writing about it since 2019, when Zero Breeze released its first luggable, battery-powered air conditioning unit. A (minor) update arrived in 2022, but now version three is here. Conceptually, the Zero Breeze Mark 3 (Roman numerals begone!) remains the same as its forebears, though the design has been tidied up a bit, giving it a cleaner and more polished look. Nevertheless, it’s still a beast of a device that is hardly something that will live in your trunk just in case you take an impromptu trip to the beach.
Portable Air
Photograph: Chris Null
Measuring 22 x 10 x 12 inches (without the battery pack installed), the Mark 3 is a little larger than the Mark II and quite a bit heavier, now weighing 22 pounds compared to the Mark II’s 17 pounds. Clip on the enormous 1,022-Wh battery pack and you’re adding another 14 pounds to the rig, though that frees you from having to be near a power outlet if you want to cool down.
I complained in both of my earlier reviews that Zero Breeze’s approach to charging was a bit silly, because although the battery pack physically clips onto the bottom of the air conditioner, it uses a separate cable to attach to the air conditioner’s charging port. Incredibly, this is still the case, though you can at least now operate the Zero Breeze from battery power while it’s simultaneously charging—something that wasn’t possible on previous iterations. (You still can’t run the Zero Breeze while charging if the battery is completely dead. It needs some juice, about a 50 percent charge, to get things going, after which it can run indefinitely.)
A new feature is that batteries can now be stacked and charged in sequence (as many as you like), each daisy-chained to the next, though at a minimum of $600 per battery, this can quickly get exorbitantly expensive. Each Mark 3 battery also has extra outputs that can be used for other devices—one USB-C port, one USB-A port, and a 12-volt DC socket. This is a downgrade from the Mark II battery, which has all of the above plus a second USB-A port. Why it was removed is a mystery.
