I installed a new Midea air-conditioner. It's an amazing device, and any praise I give it is insufficient. It's amazingly quiet, comes with great mounting hardware, looks fabulous, and works better than I could possibly imagine. It also comes with the worst remote control in the world.
I am a grouch, so when you hear me praising something, you know it's good.
Midea units are impossible to confuse with any other - the window bisects the box, nearly closing. Kind of like a chicken with the head half-cut-off, the window leaves only 10cm or so, cutting directly through most of the AC.
Like its big brothers, the compressor unit is separated and left outside, while the quiet inside device just blows cold air, remaining whisper-quiet.
Did I say it's quiet? It's really quiet. 40dB. I've had plenty of 'quiet' devices that were not, marketing be damned. This one actually is - just a quiet hiss as cold air blows out.
And it's powerful. A little window unit is currently cooling the room it was meant for, and the adjoining room twice the size, and quickly. It was a pleasant surprise, as I made plans to cram into the bedroom to sit out the hot days.
Very few complaints. The only real downside to completely cutting off the ariflow from the outside is, well, you can't blow in outside air. When it's cooler outside, you can't get the AC to blow the cool air inside, like the old noisy units. You can open a window, so it's not a big deal anyway.
The remote... It's just a remote and you don't have to use it. My suggestion is: toss it into your e-cycling container (you have one, right? Heh. I don't, and I don't know of one, in the biggest US city. We aint never gonna make it).
Back to the remote. Oh, the humanity... Why, God, why?
First of all, why does every fan and lightbulb need its own remote? Are we so ****ing lazy that we can't get off our butt twice a day and walk over to the window?
If I am so incapacitated that I need a remote, I would gladly pay for a remote that actually works, not this piece of crap. But I dare say that most people don't need one, and it does not work anyway.
Want to know why it sucks? I don't know where to start. The AC has 10 buttons (too many if you ask me, but whatever). But the remote has more like 20, including a full up/down/left/right/center cluster. It also has a custom LCD panel to display a (random) temperature, a 12-segment fan-speed indicator, and a bunch of other unrecognizable icons. It's not a button-for-button remote panel, it's a ****ing computer communicating with another computer, and we know how well that works.
So you point at the AC and press the temperature-down-button. The remote LCD shows 77, 76, 75. But unless you are pointing it at the bellybutton of the AC (wherever that is), the remote is not changing anything except its own display. Now you have 75 on the remote, 80 on the AC, and good luck trying to figure out how to sync them up. At some point during your wild handwaving, the AC comes to life and random settings change. Whatever remote buttons you pressed in desperation now come alive to bite you. If you accidentally sat on the remote, put a bag over it and carry it to the garbage can, on your tippy-toes; don't let the AC see you!
Accidentally press the 'mode' button on the remote, and the AC lights up its LED to 'AP' - the app mode. That is, it expects you to connect your AC to the Internet (it's important to control AC units across the world). Congrats, your network can now be compromised by some Russian kid who will play Tetris on your AC and encrypt your NAS. Now what kind of an imbecil would connect their air-conditioner to the Internet? Has no one watched Battlestar Galactica?
AP mode. It took me half an hour to figure out how to get out of AP mode. Hitting the 'mode' button does not do the trick. Turning the unit on and off does nothing. Turns out that the remote's 'LED' button is the only way to get out of that. Of course!
What a bunch of idiots.
But it's a great air conditioner. Hopefully the people who worked on the remote, may they burn in hell, had nothing to do with the rest of the unit.