It’s modern, covers a large space, is easy to fill with water, can be controlled using the Princess Home app and of course, kept us cool in nearly 30C heat. With scorching weather on the horizon, it pays to be prepared and whether you’re keen to stay cool while working from home or want to breeze your way through a good night’s sleep, that fan you bought just isn’t going to cut it.

It aims to impress with a cooling power of 9000BTU and a huge water extraction rate of up to 24 litres per day. Innovative items like robot vacuum cleaners and wine coolers are among her favourite tests to date, and her most notable accomplishment is toasting 360 slices of bread in a determined bid to find the best toaster. It’s the same kind of cooling that you feel on your skin when you step out of the shower: water draws heat from the environment as it evaporates, chilling the air.We measure each fan’s noise levels to find the quietest models for dozing off to, as well as its energy efficiency to find out how affordable it is to run, and its oscillation range to see how well the fan distributes air around a room. Thanks to its integrated battery, charged via USB, you can run this model for up to 14 hours without having to go any What’s more, it achieved full marks on our decibel test, proving no louder than our testing room’s background noise.

Both heating and cooling modes support Natural mode, which apparently adjusts fan speed up and down to make air feel more like a natural breeze. That’s certainly not the case for the Symphony, above – but this Honeywell cooler only emits a mouse-like 37 decibels at its lowest fan setting, making it the least obtrusive of the models we tried. It also adds quite flexible scheduling, allowing you to set the cooler up to run whenever you want, even with control over options such as oscillation. This means there’s no space to add any freezer blocks, so it’s worth chilling your water before you add it. We’ve set up air coolers right through the home in 30C heat, filling their water tanks with lots of ice and cold water for maximum effectiveness.We also loved the huge 10l water tank, which could be loaded up with ice packs (you get two in the box, but they’re pretty rudimentary) and cold water. With an Air Cooler you not only create a more pleasant indoor climate, you also enjoy other benefits.

However, it’s considerably better-looking and uses the Tuya app, which you may already use for your lights or other smart devices (I do), so this feels more of a lifestyle purchase than a purely practical one. It can even work well in conjunction with traditional heating, with that column of warm air making you feel more comfortable.They can’t refrigerate the air like an air conditioner, but they can reduce the heat through a combination of airflow and evaporation, effectively using some of the thermal energy in the air to evaporate water, so lowering its temperature before it’s driven out through a fan. and indoor humidity of 60% – slightly more damp than ideal, but fairly typical for a warm summer’s day in the UK.