The EcoFlow Wave 2 is a versatile small, portable air conditioner for heating and cooling that can be used in the home, in your camper van, or even when camping. In a world where extreme temperatures are a regular occurrence with temperature records being broken every single year, that’s an incredibly useful device. Even more so if you’re British, because our houses are typically built to keep the heat in, rather than keep us cool, and whole house air-conditioning systems are unheard of.
The Ecoflow Wave 2 is one of a raft of new products launched by Ecoflow this year, who are typically better known for solar and battery technology. A few weeks back,I reviewed the Ecoflow Glacier, a game-changing portable fridge-freezer that can make fresh ice in as little as 12 minutes even when on battery or solar power.
As expected, there is also a battery element to the Wave 2. The standard option runs off a wall socket, but you’re able to get an optional battery pack to make the Wave 2 truly portable and run off solar. More on the battery and solar power option later.
In fact, this is the world’s first battery-powered portable heat pump.
EcoFlow Wave 2
The EcoFlow Wave 2 is an impressive, versatile and truly portable air conditioner that doubles as a heater. With the use of heat pump technology, it can both heat and cool efficiently, making it perfect for various spaces such as homes, camper vans, or campsites. Its operation is flexible with manual controls, or an easy-to-use app via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. It also offers an optional battery pack for solar operation. However, the unit’s set-up can be a bit fussy and the battery is an added expense that can’t be charged without being attached to the Wave 2.For those who desire portability and versatility in their temperature control, the Wave 2 is a solid choice. But if you just want something to stick in your home for the odd extreme event, you can find better performance for cheaper elsewhere.
Heat Pump, Eh?
That’s a bit of a controversial term at the moment, at least here in the UK, where a campaign of misinformation by fossil fuel companies combined with insanely high electricity prices and badly-insulated housing stock has resulted in the familiar refrain of “heat pumps don’t work”.
But that magic heat pump technology means the Wave 2 can both cool and heat, efficiently, drawing heat from one side and giving it to the other. So it’s worth exploring very briefly how heat pumps even work.
Essentially, you have a refrigerant that’s pumped around. On one side it’s compressed, which makes it hot, and when it’s pumped over to the other side it expands and cools down. In an air-source heat pump like this, it’s drawing heat from the air, or giving some back to it, depending on how it runs.
It’s an extremely efficient way of heating and cooling, and can work with almost any ambient temperature. Even if it’s minus 3 degrees Celsius outside, it could still exploit the temperature differential between the liquid in the heat exchange system and the ambient air to extract some heat from it.
Power Output and Capabilities
The Wave 2 can warm or cool anywhere from 16 to 30 degrees Celsius, or 60 to 86 Fahrenheit, and it’s rated at 5100BTU cooling and 6100BTU of heating when AC powered, or a little less on battery. It retails at $1200 by itself, or $2200 in a bundle with the battery.
In terms of power output to price ratio, that puts it at quite a premium compared to other generic small mobile aircon units when running on AC anyway. You can find up to 9000BTU devices for as little as one-third the cost of this, though they are about double the physical size.
This sized unit should be perfect for smaller rooms, home offices, garden sheds, RVs or camper vans, but even in a larger room, you’ll still benefit depending on how closely you sit to it. A blast of cool air is still lovely, even if the overall room temperature doesn’t alter much.
Unlike a lot of traditional ACs and room heaters which are one way only, i.e., they only cool you down, or they only heat up an element to warm the room by convection, the EcoFlow Wave 2 does both, simply by switching how the pump circulates. So this will serve you well during all temperature extremes and is about as versatile as you can get.
Installing the Wave 2
Setting up the EcoFlow Wave 2 can be a bit fussy because there are a lot of things to attach and plug in. Although you could just turn it on and press go to your desired temperature, it’s not recommended because the outlet and inlet would just be pulling from the same air. You’d get some cool air blowing onto you, but the air out the back would be warmer and therefore the net ambient temperature wouldn’t change much, if at all.
The EcoFlow Wave 2 has four air intakes and outlets; two at the front, and two at the back. The lower ones draw air in, while the upper ones expel it again, having either taken a bit of heat from it, or given some heat to it. The rear inlet and outlet goes to the outside, while the front of the unit just under the control panel is your desired temperature outlet—this is where the good stuff comes from.
Therefore, you’ll want to attach the provided air ducts to get the best from the system. These are easy to attach with the provided locking adaptors, but fitting them to your window in an airtight way is the main challenge. To that end, EcoFlow also provides a DIY window vent board that you can wedge in your window, but there’s only so much they can do there, and it’s still on you to seal the other gaps somehow. I ended up using towels and such just as a quick solution, but better would be to cut your own custom piece of foam. That shouldn’t be difficult; you can use it as a template to draw around.
Also, I will note that while the semi-flexible ducting is quite long—about 6 feet—it wasn’t long enough to reach our bedroom window when the Wave 2 was placed on the floor. It’s designed for chest or waist-height window frames, so I ended up having to elevate the Wave 2 on a bedside table. Bear in mind you need about 50cm of clearance behind and in front of the unit for the semi-flexible piping to turn upwards and to enable a clear airflow. So while compact, you might need to think a little harder on the placement.
Placing the EcoFlow Wave 2 indoors and the ducting from the rear going outside is the recommended use case. But if you’re camping and want to leave the unit outside to save on space, as long as it’s not going to be rained on, then you can also do that. There’s another vent adaptor provided, which means you can just attach one tube to blow cool or warm air directly into your tent with a small gap in the tent zipper.
However, the temperature sensor for automatic operation is on the unit itself, so when using it with just the outlet duct into your tent or garden office, you’ll lose any automated features and will need to set the temperature manually. That’s not a huge problem as the Wave 2 can operate over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, so if you find it’s actually getting a bit chilly or too warm you can remotely turn it up or down or off without having to go out and lose all your cool air or warm air.
Design and Size
The basic Wave 2 unit measures 34 x 30 x 52cm (20.4 x 11.7 x 13.2 inches), without the battery, making it a lot smaller than many so-called portable air-con units. But at 14.5kg (32lbs) it’s still reasonably heavy. This isn’t something you would want to lug up a mountainside (a simple fan will have to suffice for your hiking adventures), but it’s an easy one-person lift to the trunk of your car.
Operating the Wave 2
On the left of the display is a big button to switch modes: cool, warm, or fan only. There are two buttons to set the desired temperature underneath, a fan speed setting, and another to change operation from Max, Eco, and Sleep mode. Eco mode increases battery life as long as possible, but makes it less responsive to temperature changes. Sleep cuts noise to a minimum level for sleeping. Max mode is for situations where you are just melting or freezing and don’t care; it sets the temperature to maximum or minimum, fan on full, and lets rip with the good stuff.
When on, you get a big LED color indicator bar, orange for warming, blue for cooling, and white for just fan mode.
Like all EcoFlow products, the Wave 2 is integrated beautifully with the EcoFlow app. It’s very easy to add the device to your account then set up Wi-Fi credentials for truly remote access; or just rely on Bluetooth. The app itself is a pleasure to use; it’s one of the few smart home apps that actually sits in my recent apps drawer a lot of the time.
Battery and Solar
The real superpower of the Wave 2 is the ability to be truly portable and run from battery. But this optional feature isn’t cheap, at an added $799, though it is a pretty sizeable battery pack of 1159Wh providing 2-8 hours of heating or cooling (and the ability to charge a USB-C device in a pinch). The exact performance will vary depending on how hard you’re pushing it and many other factors, so take those stated figures with a grain of salt. It also adds another 7.6kg (17lbs) and about 3 inches of height to the package.
If you have a spare EcoFlow battery, such as the Delta 2 or Delta 2 Max, you can optionally purchase a connector cable and use that instead, but the Wave 2 battery module integrates more neatly. It’s a slim, flat device that clips on the bottom of the unit and plugs in via a small flat cable on the side. Annoyingly (on the UK unit anyway, because the manual refers to two types), the power cord can’t be detached. So even when you’re running only on battery, you get a cable dangling off the edge. I assume there’s a European safety standard, particularly for AC units, that they had to comply with.
One downside to this battery, however, is that it uses older Lithium Nickel Manganese Cobalt Oxides (LiNMC), which tend to degrade to 80% capacity after just 800 cycles, unlike the superior albeit heavier LFP cells which can go for up to 3000 cycles before degradation. It’s a strange decision when all the other EcoFlow products use LFP cells.
For some reason, there’s also no way to charge the battery without it being attached to the Wave 2. you’re able to’t take the battery and charge it from solar, while leaving the Wave 2 inside and running off a household socket. This is less of a problem if you’ll only be running and charging from a wall socket, but it is a bizarre decision nonetheless.
You can use up to 400W of solar or 200W from your car cigarette lighter port to charge up the battery via the XT-60 port, so it might be worth investing in a long solar cable to keep your unit topped up on those hot, sunny days.
While I would recommend getting the battery with this for true portability, there have been some bizarre design choices here that means it’s not a perfect combination. I don’t know if that’s the product designers to blame or some obscure regulations they had to comply with.
Performance Testing
It’s been tricky to test this in real-world use cases at the moment, just because our weather is particularly mild.
For an extreme test, I put this in our greenhouse which measures around 20m2. Starting from a high of 32C, I set the cooling to max and let it go to work. It estimated 5 hours running off battery. Unfortunately, in order to make this a real test, of course, I had to close the doors and window vents, or seal them up as best as possible. It turned out that the ability of the greenhouse to heat up far outweighed the ability of the Wave 2 to cool down, so the temperature began to rise rapidly. There was some lovely cool air coming out of the Wave 2 if you stood directly next to it, but unfortunately, I had to abandon the test because it quickly reached 38C and showed no signs of stopping. It turns out, just opening the doors and windows was more effective at cooling in this case.
I also tried cooling our bedroom, which is a little bigger than average because there’s an ensuite without a door, but it’s not a massive room by any means. Our room thermometer read 19C on the other side of the room. It was 26C outside where the inlet and outlet tube was, and I’ll note that it took the Wave 2 a few minutes to catch up and correctly report the internal temperature on its own display. On max mode, it was only a minute or so before I could feel the cool air coming out, but it took a further hour for the temperature to go down by one degree celsius as measured on the other side of the room.
One last thing to note is that while there’s little else you need to do in the way of maintenance, if the ambient humidity is above 70% or pretty much whenever you’re using the cooling function, you’ll need to attach a hose to drain the system. There’s a small indicator on the screen to tell you this when it’s full and needs draining. Just plug in the hose and enable manual drainage mode via the app or by holding down the fan button for a few seconds.
Once the unit was off and the temperature normalized, I swapped over to warming. Again, I found it took about an hour to add a degree or so to the ambient temperature, though warm air was coming from the outlet after a minute or two.
In terms of noise level, it varies from a minimum of 47dB in eco mode to around 68dB in max mode. That’s quite a variation, but personally, I find the noise soothing, even at night. I have been known to play washing machine and fan soundtracks at night, which is often referred to as brown noise. It’s surprisingly relaxing. But if you are bothered by noise, the sleep mode will offer you some relief from the sweltering heat while still allowing you some shut-eye.
Should You Buy the EcoFlow Wave 2?
The Wave 2 is an incredibly versatile device that’s easy to carry around and pop in the back of your car or run off the battery pack rather than being plugged into a wall. Although expensive, being able to charge directly from solar means you may keep cool (or warm) even when the grid is unavailable. As national power systems buckle in extreme heat, that’s a useful superpower to have.
If you’re never going to travel with the Wave 2 and don’t need that portability the battery offers, it’s not worth buying. You can find something that will perform just as well, if not better, for significantly cheaper. It also won’t perform well for large spaces. But if you do have an RV or love driving out to your cabin, or wild camping, and you want one unit to suit all situations, the EcoFlow Wave 2 is a great choice.
