The Incontinent AC Saga
Posted on 2026-08-16
Don't ever buy anything from Vissani unless you want a quirked up white boy with a barely contained piss kink keeping your room cool.
One day last summer, I got so fed up with the heat in my room that I snapped and went to the Home Depot I'd been frequenting for other reasons to buy whatever random old portable air conditioner they had without doing any prior research. As regular readers of this website or blog may know, this is not my usual MO with purchases of such magnitude, but I wasn't quite thinking clearly at the time and I just wanted my bedroom to be a comfortable temperature before the next time I had to attempt to sleep in it. I now regret being so hasty.
Anyway, I returned with a Vissani VAPA05R4HWT portable air conditioner which, to be fair, was and continues to be perfectly fine at its primary job of reducing the ambient temperature in my bedroom to tolerable levels, in spite of my many gripes with its design, the full-length write-up of which I will mercifully spare you here.
One of the few design features of this model that I like is that it's supposed to have a moisture sensor that detects when the internal condensate collection reservoir is full and shuts the unit off with an error code until it's drained. In my case, this sensor has never once tripped, leading after several weeks of constant use to some large amount of water leaking out through the poorly-sealed drain port and into my carpet.
The bucket I put under the drain port in case it happened again was dry for the rest of that summer, but I've spent this summer in an arms race with this thing to try to prevent it from starting a black mould garden in my bedroom.
After it puked its guts up again for the first time this year (mercifully onto vinyl floorboards this time) my response was to put it up on a chair with the included length of drain hose running into an empty 1 or so gallon ice cream bucket, which I had assumed would be good for at least a few days of output. I came back in a few days to the bucket completely full and water spilling out around it. I emptied the bucket and checked it again the next day, and it was already overfilled again.
Worrying, but I had an easy solution: Replace the dinky 1 gallon bucket with a 5 gallon hardware store bucket. That should take more than 18 hours to fill. Of course, as if realizing that I had it beat and it would have to get creative, my Vissani managed to do this:
At this point, I was about ready to take a sledgehammer to this pile of scrap, but before I could a good friend of mine had an idea that I'm frankly embarrassed I didn't think of a year ago: If the leaky AC won't reliably drain into an external bucket, simply put it in the bucket.
Unfortunately, this particular unit was too big for the 5 gallon bucket I had on hand, and readily available buckets seem to top out about there, so the next best thing was a plastic tub, relatively shallow so it won't restrict airflow.
I'm now pleased to report that I believe the air conditioner has finally lost our little battle. It pissed again today and, wouldn't you know it, the tub caught it.
Also, amusingly, when I posted about this on Fedi, I learned that I'm not the first to have to do this with their Vissani product.
As irrationaly self-satisfied as I am with having defeated a messy air conditioner, absolutely none of this would have been necessary if Vissani had just made their thing properly. 3/5 stars.