I've had mine for over 3 months now and I only had to drain it once!!! I asked my Mom to please do it for me, as I was on my way out the door when the red light came on and it turned itself off. So although I'm not sure how easy it is to get to, I DO know that it doesn't leak water everywhere!!!! The size is reasonable at about a foot by a foot, it fit right next to my desk really easily in my tiny room. It also arrived early and wasn't super expensive. My Mom gave me a hand installing mine and the metal plate thingy was too big for my window... Soooo.... we improvised and used some of the styrofoam packing material to fill in the gap, and it's STILL in my window, and even in the pouring rain, there's no water leaking through. The remote kinda sorta works. It worked for the first couple of months and then I must've pressed too hard on one of the buttons because it doesn't work anymore. I find the noise level fine..... since I'm used to noise all night long from my fan going 24/7. It feels weird to me when there's not noise in my room. Sooooo.... hence why I find the noise levels just fine. The unit doesn't quite cool my entire room down. Buuutt it doesn't help that my Mom won't let me go past a certain temperature setting because she doesn't want to pay extra for the electricity. We're also in the height of summer here in Maine, which isn't helping at all!!! The unit does help cool down the entire upstairs floor though. Just an FYI though, this thing is a teeny bit too smart, as it turns itself off once it deems the room cold enough. Sooooo.... if you fuss with the temperature and go down 1 degree, it tends to run all night long. Orrrr... if you're already cold enough, you can turn on Fan mode and when the unit is in fan mode it does NOT turn itself off. There's also a few random air bubbles on the control panel...... BUT other than those minor issues... The shipping and price weren't too bad to me. It was like, 210ish.... I don't think that's too bad, considering some air conditioners can be more like 600!!!