I searched the archives and couldn't find anything about a portable cooling units so am resorting to posting, sorry if its redundant.

I am setting up a development lab and need additional cooling on a temporary basis.

All cooling units move heat from point A to point B. The end result is that point A gets cooler, but, and it's a BIG but, point B gets hotter. If you use portable coolers, you have to decide where point B is and can you get away with increasing the heat there? Will you blow the heat back into the development lab? Or into the office space next door? Or into the space above the suspended ceiling which indirectly channels the heat into every room on the same floor? Or under the raised flooring where it can raise the temperature of every cabinet that is not being cooled by the portable units? IMHO, portable coolers are a bad idea. They add noise to the environment and increase the overall heat level due to the consumption of electricty. When we had them in our office for a week, I started working 3 hour days to escape the hellish atmosphere. In the past I regularly worked in buildings that were 35 degrees Celsius indoors (2 degrees C less than core body temperature) and it was much more comfortable than that week with the portable coolers. --Michael Dillon P.S. it would be interesting to know if anyone has some creative solutions to data center design to cope with cooling system failure other than n+1 redundant coolers.