Sunday, July 17, 2005

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.

7 Comments:

At 7:10 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ugh, it's been pretty damn hot here in Halifax too. It's really bad downtown as there often isn't even a lick of breeze.

We just moved to a house in Spryfield (close to one of the bad parts on the outskirts of town heh). Problem is all the windows are casement instead of vertical sliding, so our A/C is useless now. Luckily there's usually a pretty good breeze up here, but it can still get pretty hot upstairs.

 
At 7:59 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I keep hearing about this heat problem in Toronto, but it seems so remote right now. The weather here has been great, around 20C, since I arrived in Vancouver. Of course the weather network is indicating it will be 30C tomorrow, and forecasts that next Wednesday it will be 35C. Perhaps my happiness about Vancouver summers will be changing rather soon.

 
At 1:16 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think the front of that heatwave has his here now too... the last week has been 30C+ and more with the humidex. Today its just under 40C out there.

Lucky for me I have a large liquid cooling system in the backyard! Yay for swimming!

Dont you live in one room of a multi-room building? Would there be a way to put a big AC in the middle, say in the kitchen or something, and let it cool the whole place down? Just leave your door open when your home, put a fan in the door to blow some air in.

 
At 8:06 PM, Blogger Keith said...

I live in a room on a 2-room 2nd floor of an old house with bad wiring. Not a chance we can put in a big air conditioner.

 
At 8:06 PM, Blogger Keith said...

By the way, Travis: are you who I think you are?

 
At 8:24 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Probably...

The one with the twin brother, Trevor.

 
At 6:22 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well done on a nice blog Keith. I was searching for information on portable air conditioners and ran across your post The Heat Is On - not exactly what I was looking for related to portable air conditioners but a very interesting read all the same!

 

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