So…hot enough for you? Have you ever noticed that even when the temperature is sort of reasonable outside the house still manages to heat up like a furnace?
Of course you people blessed with central air conditioning have no idea what I’m talking about, do you? While the rest of us struggle to find ways to stay cool, you’re going about your daily business, safe in the knowledge that the temperature in your house will remain constant no matter what it’s doing outside.
But heat is one thing, humidity is something else altogether, something else you people with central air don’t have to worry about. You can look at the temperature and think “Oh, this isn’t so bad” but you’d be wrong. You've forgotten about the humidex.
This is what happens when you live right on a large body of water, like Lake Ontario. Just like the wind chill in the winter makes it colder than it’s supposed to be, the humidex makes it hotter. So on a day that the temperature is only 24 Celsius, which is a reasonable 75 Fahrenheit, the humidity makes it feel like 36 C, which is an unholy 97 F.
And let’s not forget the creeping dampness, caused by the humidity. This is where everything around you feels damp – you, your clothes, your furniture, your pets – there’s no escaping it. Bread goes mouldy in the blink of an eye.
We do not have central air. We have two window air conditioners – one in the dining room and one in the upstairs hallway. There’s an oscillating fan on the dining room table that blows the cold air into both the kitchen and living room, and we have a couple of fans upstairs – but we only use those if it’s really bad.
For a fan to work well enough to cool you down for sleeping, it pretty much has to be blowing directly on you. Even in high humidity this tends to dry you out a little too much and you wake up with a sore throat. And let’s not forget the noise. Fans tend to be just a tad on the noisy side. Not as loud as an air conditioner (which is why it’s not in the bedroom), but enough to bother your ears if you have to listen to it all night.
Last night the air conditioner in the upstairs window died. The hubby managed to resuscitate it for a short time, but around 1:30 a.m. it began making a grinding, clanking noise, which even if it had still been blowing cold air (which it wasn’t) we wouldn’t have been able to sleep through. It was just fortunate that it had cooled down enough outside that what little cold air came out of the unit’s last gasp was enough to keep us going through the night.
I really have to wonder though, how did we ever survive the heat before air conditioners?
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