The Heat Is On

Everyone has a certain temperature range that he or she would consider to be his or her comfort zone. For me, that's the 15-20 degrees celcius range.

It's been nowhere near that in Toronto this summer.

This past week, it's been between 25 and 35 degrees. Worse still... I have no air conditioning. Needless to say, I've been so uncomfortable that I haven't been sleeping properly.

It's not that I am air-conditioner-less. It's that my air conditioner is sitting here unusable. When my last air conditioner, a 5200 BTU window unit, broke down (after the warranty expired of course!), I rediscovered just how inconvenient and annoying it is to install and uninstall window air conditioners. The blasted things are fairly heavy and quite bulky. Plus while you're trying to put in or remove the unit, your window is wide open and bugs can come flying into your room at will.

Last year, I had an incident where my room was swarming with flies. I had no idea how they got there, but when I came home from work one day, I opened my door and there were about 50 flies zooming around! I opened the window and most of them escaped through there. One theory is that one (or possibly more) came in through an open window and laid a bunch of eggs in a vent or something. I'm now extremely careful to keep my window closed at all times because there's no way I want to relive that episode.

To make a long story shorter, I discovered the magic of portable air conditioners. Admittedly, portable air conditioners are larger and heavier than a window unit. However, rather than sitting on your window ledge, they sit inside your room and connect to the window with a tube. The tube connects to a rectangular piece of hard plastic that is shaped to fit into your window so that the window can close most of the way and there will be no gaps for insects to enter through. How amazing is that?! So when the winter comes, I simply remove the plastic piece and the tube from the window and close the window. In the summer, I just stick the plastic piece in the window and pull the window against the plastic. So cool.

Portable air conditioners are a lot more expensive than window units, butin my opinion are well worth it. Plus, most portable ACs come with a dehumidifier built in, which I needed anyway. So I bought one.

It was amazing for the first month or so. Then in the second month, it started to cause the power to go out on my floor. How it worked so consistently well for so long then suddenly not at all for a few days straight is beyond me considering that in all the time that I had it, the amount of electricity being used on my floor had never increased.

One solution would be to use an extension cord and use the power from a different circuit. This would be great, except that I need a special air conditioner extension cord (regular cords are fire hazards) and the cord is not supposed to exceed 25 feet (or it will be a fire hazard). The outlet is in the room directly below mine. If I could drill a hole in the floor, I would not need more than 15 feet. In order to go from my room to the stairs, then down the stairs, and back over to the room under mine, I would need about 40-50 feet of cord.

Another solution would be to fix the wiring in the basement so that one of my outlets has its own circuit.

Well right off the bat, I can't use the 40-50 foot cord idea.
My landlady does not want to drill a hole in the floor (which I can accept), so the extension cord is not an option.
She also does not want to fix the wiring in the basement (this I don't agree with, but I obviously can't force her to do this).

Basically, I'm out of luck.

Sleepless in Seattle? Try Sleepless in Scarborough.