As weather Heating, summer traps arrive: swimsuits, mosquitoes and natural portable air conditioners.
It's one thing to do with AC everywhere now, and in fact, I've been writing about it since 2019 when Zero Breeze released the first light-sustainable, battery-powered air-conditioning unit. (Minor) Update arrived in 2022, but now the third version is here. Conceptually, the Zero Breeze Mark 3 (Roman numeral begone!) remains the same with its predecessors, although the design has been sorted out a little bit to give it a cleaner, more refined look. However, it remains a beast of equipment that hardly lives in your trunk just in case you improvise the beach trip.
Portable air
Photo: Chris Null
The Mark 3 measures 22 x 10 x 12 inches (without a battery pack mount), is a little bigger than the Mark II and is 22 pounds heavier than the Mark II's 17 pounds. Clipped onto the huge 1,022-WH battery pack, you add another 14 pounds to the rig, although this prevents you from having to get close to the power outlet if you want to cool down.
I complained in both earlier comments that Zero Breeze charging method is a bit stupid because although the battery pack physically clamps the battery pack to the bottom of the air conditioner, it connects to the charging port of the air conditioner using a separate cable. Incredibly, this is still the case, although you can run zero breeze from the battery power at least while charging at the same time as the battery level is, which is not possible in previous iterations. (If the battery dies completely, you still can't have zero breezes while charging. It requires some juice (about 50% charge) to get things running, after which it can run indefinitely.)
A new feature is that it can now be stacked and charged in sequence (as you want), each daisy chain is chained to the next, and although the minimum battery per battery is at least $600, this will quickly become expensive soon. Each tag 3 battery also has additional output that can be used for other devices – a USB-C port, a USB-A port and a 12-volt DC socket. This is a downgrade of the Mark II battery, which has all the above mentioned batteries as well as a second USB-A port. Why it is deleted is a mystery.
