AC Finder for Indian Homes | indoorair.guide

Score air conditioner models for an Indian home against your room size, city climate, indoor air quality needs, and serviceability. Uses OEM-sourced specs for 13 Indian brands plus live AQI and outdoor temperature where available, with fallbacks to city peak-season defaults.

How the score is built

Each AC is scored across six dimensions with explicit weights: build and reliability (20), energy efficiency (20), cooling performance (20), AC hygiene and IAQ (20), comfort and usability (10), and serviceability (10). The weights shift slightly based on the city — coastal cities upweight build durability and serviceability because salt-air corrosion is the dominant failure mode, while high-AQI cities upweight IAQ-related features such as PM2.5 filtration and self-clean cycles.

No marketing claims are scored. Inputs come from OEM India websites and ISEER/BEE ratings — third-party reviews, retailer copy, and influencer scores are excluded.

City-aware inputs

The tool ships defaults for major Indian cities calibrated to peak seasonal stress, not annual averages. Delhi defaults to AQI 185 and 40 °C dry-bulb to reflect a typical May–June pre-monsoon stress test. Mumbai defaults to AQI 90 and 36 °C with a coastal humidity penalty. Bengaluru defaults to AQI 65 and 28 °C — the most benign of the metros — so the score does not over-pay for cooling headroom you will never use.

When the browser permits, the tool overrides the city default with live AQI from a CPCB-style interpolation and live outdoor temperature from Open-Meteo. The "Power user" mode also exposes the underlying weights so you can rebalance for a specific room — e.g. raising serviceability if you live outside the top metros.

Coastal versus inland

Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Kochi, Visakhapatnam, Mangalore, Kozhikode, Thiruvananthapuram, Goa, Surat, and Bhubaneswar are treated as coastal. For these cities the tool rewards models with corrosion-resistant condenser coils (blue-fin, gold-fin, or copper-only condensers without aluminium fins), and penalises split units with exposed outdoor PCBs that fail early in salt air.

Inland cities — Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, and others — instead upweight ISEER, low-noise operation, and PM2.5 filtration. For Delhi and other NCR cities specifically, the tool flags whether the model includes a dedicated PM filter and gives explicit guidance that an AC is not a substitute for a properly sized air purifier during October–February.

Purifier pairing guidance

When ambient AQI exceeds 100 the tool surfaces a note explaining that even ACs with built-in PM filters are designed primarily for cooling — face velocity and filter media are not equivalent to a dedicated air purifier sized to 5 air changes per hour. A separate CADR recommendation is shown so the user can size a paired purifier from the same room dimensions used to score the AC.