Anyone work from home and have a two story house with 1 AC unit? Office upstairs gets crazy hot. How much do window units cost to run?

Hello guys,

so since the pandemic, i have been working from home which is great, however not so great for my AC.

I have a 2-story house which is on the limit of the building standard requirements for 2 AC units, so the builders being cheap Houston builders gave me 1 unit.

The problem is the thermostat is downstairs, and if I set it to 75, my upstairs is like 82-84 depending on the day. It's too hot to work.

I bought a sensor to set my AC to the upstairs, but when I do that upstairs is 75 and downstairs is 67. It's a literally freezer downstairs, and I'm just wasting money cooling it to such a low temperature. My AC unit has to stay pumped 24/7 to achieve this, and its stupid.

Obviously – the easy answer is to add a second AC unit, but that will cost 10-15k, which is no beuno right now.

I see some people with window units? are they efficient? do they work well? how much do they cost to run?

I also contacted a few AC tech companies and they said essentially – the builders are probably cheaper out on ducting and it's not setup correctly to distribute the air to even the temperature out throughout the house.

They said the downside is this: it's $500 just to test the airflow in the rooms and figure out if that is the issue, and if it is – it's going to be very costly as the downstairs ducting is not accessible short of ripping off the ceiling.

They all said work like that could run into 5k or more.

At that point, i might as well just stump up for a 2nd AC unit.

So in the meantime, I'm trying to figure out options other than taking cold showers every 60 minutes or so.