Are portable air conditioners any good?
As a stopgap, just about; as a solution, no. A portable unit exhausts its heat through a hose out a window that must stay open around it, leaking heat straight back in, so it delivers roughly half its rated cooling in practice, at 44 to 55 dB(A) beside you all night. An installed split cools better, silently, for a third of the electricity per degree.
The physics is the problem, not the build quality. Cooling means moving heat outdoors, and the portable's route out is a flexible hose through a partially open window. The gap around the hose lets warm air back in, the hose itself radiates heat into the room, and the unit's exhaust creates negative pressure that pulls warm air in from the rest of the house. It fights itself all day.
Then there is the noise: the whole machine, compressor included, sits in the room with you. Manufacturers quote 44 to 55 dB(A), which in a quiet bedroom at 2am reads as a vacuum cleaner two rooms away. The commonest sentence in our survey conversations is some variant of 'we bought a portable and cannot sleep near it'.
Where portables honestly earn a place: rented homes where fixing anything is impossible, a few days of extreme heat in an otherwise fine house, or rooms awaiting a permanent solution. If that is your situation, choose one with the highest EER you can find, seal the window gap around the hose properly, and accept the noise as the price.
The comparison that decides most people: two or three summers of buying and tolerating portables costs what a proper split install costs, and at the end of it you own a quiet, permanent system that also heats. We convert a lot of portable owners.
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