Welp, it’s supposed to hit 110 sometime in the next few days. The flowers are frying, and summer has finally arrived.
A few blogging friends came over yesterday. The pool was warm enough to swim in but still cool enough to be refreshing—not yet bathwater temp but getting there.
A 110-degree day means the air conditioning will have to run all day long. Hateful. I don’t like having to keep the house closed up 24 hours a day. It’s stuffy and claustrophobic. And the expense! OMG! I’m expecting bills to rise well over $200, and that’s if I keep it uncomfortably warm inside the house. If you want it cool enough so that you don’t break a sweat walking to the bathroom, you’ll pay $300 for the privilege.
According to Wunderground, though, night-time temps should stay in the 70s—tonight it cools to 77; on Thursday (supposedly) it drops all the way to 70. So maybe I can shut the AC off at night. That will help some.
And in my new penury, I’m going to have to wrestle with the ever-annoying digital thermostat, the contraption that decidedly does not save on power consumption. Right now it’s set to cool the house to a temperature where I can sleep at night and then go back up to stifling about midnight, when I hope to be out cold. That’s going to have to stop: cooling the place into the 70s, even for three or four hours, is now outside my budget.
I need to find a new air-conditioning contractor. Our regular outfit has gone to seed. In addition to having installed said thermostat, which appears to be inappropriate for the heat pump on my house, they gouged us $500 for a repair on the downtown house’s swamp cooler that we would not have done had they called first and said what they intended to charge, and now they’re trying to nick us another $85 to have the guy come back and fix it because he didn’t install the pump right! I’m totally fed up with that outfit and am going to call my neighbor Sally’s AC guy to do the annual service on my unit, which my guys have quietly forgotten.
I’m sorry to can them, because I know the company has been struggling through the deprecession—they’ve laid off all their staff but one guy, who apparently is not busy full time, because they cut his salary to half-time. But we can’t support their business single-handed, which is evidently what they expect. Hope Sally’s guy is OK…the air conditioning business around here is awash in incompetents and crooks. She’s a wily old gal, though, and so I have some hope that he can do the job without cleaning out my bank account.
Maybe.
Do you have specific thermostats for each room? I’m guessing not, but that way you could keep just your bedroom cool, which might save on things.
In our apartment, we have great a/c but I’m guessing because the ducts need to be cleaned, just about none of it reaches our bedroom. So we run a fan at night and it’s enough to keep us cool just running on level one or two. Might be one inexpensive way to keep cool at night. (I can’t sleep if I’m too hot!)
@ Abigail: Hmmmm…. If I had a thermostat in my bedroom, the unit would run nonstop all night and all day. For some reason, that’s the hottest room in the house.
Actually, I’m thinking about moving the TV out and setting up that room as a guest bedroom. Even though the AC vent in there is tiny, it’s much cooler than the other bedrooms. Figure I could move in there during the summer.
{heh heh heh heh heh} Then I’d have a summer home and a winter home, just like the jet-setters! 😀