Best air coolers that will get you through the summer heatwave

Want to feel like royalty while trying to escape the heat? Then no brand better fits this description than Princess. Its smart air cooler not only looks sleek and modern with a touch-screen display, it also cooled us down in 30C heat, and we loved that we could control it with the Princess Home app, at home or outdoors. It’s honestly dreamy being able to turn the air cooler on half an hour before you get home so that, when you put the key into the door and walk into the bedroom, your met with a beautifully chilled room.

While it wasn’t the most powerful air cooler we’ve tested, working most effectively in smaller rooms, it features a more-efficient motor, making it surprisingly quiet for its size. We also loved that we could set up schedules and timers within the Princess Home app. There’s even a remote included for increasing the fan speed and switching modes. The water tank is fairly small, however, so you won’t be able to stuff it full of ice packs. Princess does give two small ice-pack bottles in the box, but they only just fit inside the tank.

It’s small, slim profile also meant that it was easy to move from room to room. While it doesn’t come with casters like the other models on this list, it’s so light that we could just pick it up and move it around. It’s a great little machine that oscillated smoothly around our room to keep us cool and comfortable.

If you want an air cooler with a large enough capacity to fit multiple ice packs and litres and litres of water, without needing a refill, we’re big fans of Black + Decker’s tower air cooler. It’s a free standing machine with a 7l tank capacity and easy to use button controls. It’s pretty light and easy to shift around the house, with casters inside the box, too.

Adding water to the tank can be a bit of a fuss because of the lock pump, which has to be attached to the tank when put back in. We found it easier to fill the tank with water while it was still partially inside the machine, rather than untangling the pump and taking the whole thing out. But it evaporated water through the honeycomb filter well, cooling down our room effectively.

There are two different modes – air cooling or the fan-only mode which can oscillate automatically. There’s no timer or sleep mode on this manual model, but you can pay a little bit extra for the model with a remote (£109, Amazon.co.uk) and you’ll get those features. And while there are two ice packs in the box, they’re so small that you’re probably better off running out to the supermarket and buying a tray of ice cubes yourself.

Evapolar’s Evalight Plus is is an engineering marvel. The tiny box-shaped “personal” air cooler is a portable air cooler, purifier and humidifier all in one, and can be plugged into the mains, a laptop or power bank using the included USB cable. It’s intended to be placed on your desk or bedside table and worked a dream when it came to delivering a strong, cool breeze directly to our face.

There’s a cartridge on the inside which absorbs the water from the tank, then the fan blows the evaporating water through the vents on the front. The filter on the inside is made from inorganic fibres, which Evapolar says should stop mould and bacteria forming (though this does need to be replaced every six months). We loved that we could just pull up the water tank attached to the side of the air cooler to fill it up and then slot it back in. No fussing with a lock pump. That tank also turns into a soothing nightlight when it’s on with different colour options.

The super modern control wheel on the top can be turned clockwise to increase the fan speed and anti-clockwise to lower it. The display, used to control the LED light, also shows you the temperature in your room and what temperature it’s blowing out (for us it showed 31C inside and 23C blowing out). It does get a little loud when on the highest setting, but it worked really well, and it’s intelligently designed. It will also last about an hour before needing another refill of water.

The only real downside is the price. Full-size tower air coolers cost less, and the vent also doesn’t automatically oscillate – you have to direct the grills towards your face manually.

The Igenix smart digital air cooler is an absolute work of art, we may as well have just stolen it from the Louvre, and it’s also a top contender thanks to its smarts. The modern-looking machine can be controlled with the touch-control buttons on the top, the remote or the Smart Life app, which we already use a lot at home (so no learning new applications). Plus it works with Alexa and Google Assistant, so we never had to get out of bed to turn it off.

It is a fairly simple machine to operate, generally speaking. There are three fan speeds, a night mode and a timer function – you can programme it to power off after two hours, four hours or eight – but is a great little machine. We loved that it came with the wheels already on the bottom, so we didn’t have to screw them on ourselves. Plus, it covers a lot of room when it oscillates, featuring 120-degrees of oscillation. Though, we often found it performed most effectively when the fan was directed right at us. We also loved the huge 10l water tank, which could be loaded up with ice packs (you get two in the box, but they’re pretty rudimentary) and cold water.

Pro Breeze’s air cooler was an absolute star when it came to cooling our room down quickly and quietly. It’s a heatwave hero and effectively brought the heat down in our living room. We liked that it featured a buckle to lock the water tank in place and that we could control the 7-hour timer and sleep modes using the included remote. Oh, and you get some goood quality ice packs with the Pro Breeze.

It’s one of the most powerful coolers we’ve tested, really helping to bring the heat down in our room by a few degrees. It oscillated smoothly, reaching a good portion of our room, and the inclusion of a natural mode was a nice touch. It decreased the fan speed by one every 30 minutes, something we found useful when heading to bed. Again, as with most air coolers, the inside pump lock in the water tank can be fiddly to click into place, but once you get to grips with it, it’s simple enough. Most of the time, we just brought a bucket of water to the tank instead of taking the reservoir to the sink.

Another thing to note is that the air cooler can get a little smelly if you don’t change the water or don’t clean the cardboard honeycomb filter on first use (they’re not nicknamed swamp coolers for no reason). Just remember to pour out the excess liquid when you’ve finished using it.

If the Evapolar evalight plus (£149, Currys.co.uk) is too far out of your budget, but you still want a personal air cooler that can sit on your desk, JML’s chillmax pure 2.0 is a great budget option. So though it doesn’t work via USB – you’ll need to plug it into the wall, but that’s a small compromise for cool air at a budget – it performed just as well when it came to cooling down our personal space.

Great for kids’ bedrooms, it has an LED light that switches between seven different colours and there are four different fan speed settings. There’s even a setting that gets it to produce a fine mist, but we found it to be more of a fun little gimmick than something that was actually useful. There’s a washable silver-infused filter on the inside too, something that JML says is handy for stopping mould from building up.

We liked that we could fill the reservoir from the top and that it lasted about seven hours before we had to refill the water tank. One drawback is the sound of the fan – it’s incredibly loud for such a small device, and sounds like it could be twice the size based on the volume it produces. Nonetheless, it’s a handy little gadget, just be sure to angle it at your face or you won’t feel the effects.