apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I have a wooden box, which is covered with some sort of plastic (previous tenant had it made to fit the unit) that goes over the a/c on the outside, which helps, but even with that there's a draft. So this year I've bought some foamboard from the craft store, and I'm planning to make a cover to go over the inside part of the a/c... what I plan to do is to make kind of a box of strips of the foamboard (it's like poster board with thin foam between the pieces of poster board -- hope you know what I mean), and stick that to another piece of foamboard, and put the thing over the a/c. I'm going to put a nice piece of art paper over the foamboard, to make it match the wall color, more or less, and then prop pictures on the top of the "box" part, to make it look more decorative, and less weird. If I ever get it done, I'll post pics on my Flickr.

I would suggest making a simple box that fits around the unit. You could make it out of a lightweight wood like 1/4 birch. This would be more decorative than covering it with plastic or such and then you could just remove it when you want to use it again.

My mom hung a quilt rack like this one over our air conditioner. She hung it so that the a/c unit was below half of it. In the summer, she would fold the quilt in half so that it hung beside the a/c unit, and in the winter, the quilt was hung normally so that it covered and insulated the a/c.

http://www.dwrwood.com/17.html

Take off the front cover, fill with drop cloths, old towels, bedsheets, etc, Duct tape any additional space where you still feel air coming in.

I sewed my own fleece-cover, with a decorative ribbon pattern on the front. But fleece curtains might also be an effective approach?

Many landlords here in NYC require tenants to take their window units completely out during the winter months, so it won't cost them so much in heating fuel costs to keep the buildings warm, and some of them offer their staff to help with this, and will even STORE them for you! There may be services there that will do that, although I'd be careful who I stored such an expensive thing with.

- Curtis

Curtis -- that would work for a window air conditioner, Kristy's (and mine) are built in to the wall. Take it out and you have way more problems than just a bit of a draft, you have a huge gaping hole in your wall!

This may be a strange solution, but in my old apartment, I had the exact same problem...on the 5th floor...in Chicago!! Talk about cold and windy! I wound up using Press N Seal to cover the unit (inside my apartment)! It's transparent, and sticky, and fit tightly. I had to go around the edges with some scotch tape to make sure there were no gaps, but it worked perfectly! I had to redo it once during the winter (the wind would make it billow a little over time, and it got loose) but it was the cheapest possibly solution, and not horribly ugly!