1.5 ton is India's best-selling AC size because it fits the most common Indian bedroom and living room: about 140-190 sq ft on a middle floor. On a top floor with afternoon sun, the same unit covers nearer 130 sq ft, and a 2 ton becomes the right size — our tonnage calculator works this out in ten seconds.
Check rated watts, not just the tonnage in the name. A true 1 ton is 3,517 W, 1.5 ton is 5,275 W and 2 ton is 7,034 W, and several units sold in each class are rated 5-12% below that. Every product here publishes its rated cooling where the brand does, and our room-size advice is calculated from it. In this class that gap is wide: LG's AS-Q19MNXE is rated 5,300 W, Samsung's AR50H18D1ZH 4,750 W, and Haier's 1.6 ton HSU19K 5,460 W.
Compare ISEER before the star count. ISEER is the cooling an AC delivers per unit of electricity across a typical Indian season, and the star is cut from it — so two 5-star units on this page can still differ by a fifth in what they cost to run. Where a brand does not publish ISEER or annual units, we say so on the product, because that silence is information too.