In coming to NYC, I understood that most places that I could ever conceive of affording would be without central air. I know, I know...Old houses, it's only hot for a couple weeks out of the year, blah, blah, blah. I got it. It's a LIE. It is now officially the middle of July and quite possibly hotter here than in the south where it supposedly gets "dirty" hot. Seriously folks...the time has come to stop playing the hot-only-2-weeks-in-August card.
Now we are very fortunate and have not one, but TWO window air conditioning units. We're living life large in NYC. The problem is that I have no experience either cooling a house with one of these or paying a bill where one of these is used. I have a very intense (and pretty realistic) fear that our next bill will be $500.00. I do have a price to be comfortable and cool and it's slightly less than that. So now we play the game or what I like to call Jenny vs. the window air conditioner. Here are just a few of the situations that I'm either up against in defeating this beast or have to consider when going to battle:
- Do you section off the apartment to speed up the cooling process by filtering the air into only one room?
- If you do this, do you leave the windows open in all other rooms even though it's 100 degrees outside or are you somehow only damaging your cooling mission by doing that?
- How do you work the sleep scenario? If you leave it on and fall asleep, you risk running it for the next 6 hours and adding mucho dinero to the bill.
- If you only run it for the hour before you fall asleep, you're bound to wake up 2 hours later looking like you just went for a work out.
- When you wake up 2 hours later, do you just turn it back on and go to sleep (therefore reverting back to #3)?
- Or do you just open the window when you wake up? It's still not going to get really cool but at least you're saving money.
- Does the economy setting really do anything? The air is still cold and it's still blowing out.
- Realistically, what is this doing to my bill? Comfortable and cool definitely have a price cap for me. I have a feeling that I'm going to be over it when I see the next bill.
We tend to section off the bathroom/pantry/kitchen side of our place since the air conditioner is in the living room, thus cooling down that one room pretty quick since it's only technically meant to cool one room. With that being said, I was having a conversation with my mom the other day and told her that I'm now officially one step closer to knowing what it feels like to use the bathroom in an outhouse...I had just come back from using ours and it was at least 95 degrees in there! Stay tuned...
