Looks like the next week and a half will be one of those times we wish we had A/C in coastal California. It was warm last night (temperature has been below seventy every morning when we get up, but it was 73 this morning). Can’t really justify the expense and electricity of central air, but maybe we’ll finally be motivated to get a window or portable unit for the bedroom.
[Noon update]
People are talking about split units in comments. No way we’d spend that kind of money, particularly when we have no use for a heat pump. We just need something to keep the bedroom cool to sleep at night.
[Saturday-morning update]
Well, so far, so good. It never got below 74 in the house, but we slept well. If it gets no worse than that, we’ll be OK. The worst thing about Santa Anas is that when the wind comes from the east, we can hear the sound of the 405 freeway, which is about a mile away. Otherwise, the neighborhood is quiet, because despite being half a block from a major thoroughfare to the west, the sound is blocked by a dune that our place is at the bottom of.
You may find that a mini-split would be a viable option. They are so much quieter than a conventional window unit, your handyman skills likely would enable you to install it yourself.
I see that split systems come pre-charged with refrigerant, but you have to do a good leak-free plumbing job of connecting the indoor and outdoor units that the refrigerant doesn’t leak out.
Rand, are you on time-of-day pricing for electricity? I use a time-of-day thermostat along with manual adjustment to conditions to have the lowest temperature in the AM, let the house temperature rise during the day and then start lowering the temperature in the late evening. It turns out the A/C is most efficient when the outside temperature is lower, so keeping your thermostat set a a constant 78-deg as the power company recommends is not efficient (I let my indoor temperature peak at 78-deg, 78-deg is rather warm unless you have indoor fans going, which also use power). At a constant setting, the A/C will run most in the late afternoon and early evening, when both the rates at the outside temperature is highest.
If you have time-of-day pricing, when is the change from the high, peak rate? 10 PM? 11 PM? Midnight? There is a certain “what’s mine is mine and what’s your’s is mine” aspect to time-of-day pricing, where to get any relief from peak rates, you have to use electricity at really inconvenient times.
We would only use it in the bedroom to sleep at night. It doesn’t get that uncomfortably warm in the house where we live unless we’re trying to sleep.
” so keeping your thermostat set a a constant 78-deg as the power company recommends”
Monsters. They need to be drug before the UN for crimes against humanity.
A 78-deg indoor temperature can actually be rather comfortable, or it can be stuffy as anything. It depends on your indoor humidity.
It is also not all that energy, grid resource utilization and cost efficient as most of your A/C usage will be concentrated in the “duck bill” peak time that is shifted from the solar generation peak.
The power companies are stoopid in the conservation advice they offer to customers.
78 is way too hot to be comfortable in. Some people, crazy people, may like it but the preferences of the deranged should not be forced on normal people. Everyone us different but the nudge of totalitarianism should be rejected by all.
What’s next the thermostat should be set above 67 in the winter?
https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan-options/time-of-use-base-plan/time-of-use-plan.page
I see PG&E has to peak/off-peak rate plans. One plan charges the peak rate from 4-9 PM every day and the other charges the peak rate 5-8 PM only on non-holiday weekdays.
The 4-9 PM plan doesn’t sound like such a bad deal. You can “run the hill” by running the A/C until 4 PM and then switch the A/C back on at 9 PM.
If you have a solar panel, I would have to look at the bid and ask of feeding power back to the grid. But it is probably more energy saving to run your A/C full blast mid day when your panel is pumping out electrons and then “coast” until after 9 PM when you can run the A/C on grid power at the off-peak rate?
My Leaf(tm) thermostat has awarded me 31 green leaves in July for lack of central air. Can I use those leaves to offset the electric bill from washing/drying sweaty clothes?
Congratulations on your pixie leaves.
Mini-splits are a great value, in my opinion. You can get a 9000 BTU unit delivered by Amazon for about $700. Paul is right, they come pre-charged with freon, you just need to be careful to avoid leaks when connecting it up.
Just zip down to your local store and grab a window mount with more than enough BTU’s for a bedroom. The reason to go with a window mount is that it’s cheap and doesn’t take up much space in a U-Haul when you leave California. It’s also easier to hide a seldom-used window mount from state anti-air-conditioner arrest squads when Democrats inevitably deploy those in residential neighborhoods to combat global warming.
Well assuming it not dry enough for a swamp cooler.
How bout just a fan to keep the air moving in the bedroom , if it not unbearable hot or humid. Some circulation should make the room feel colder by a few degrees and maybe keep the window covered during the day.
The Man Rand said he wanted a “fine” air conditioner and he is going to get himself a “fine” air conditioner.
Swamp cooler. Fan. Window covering. Jeez.
The problem with this heat wave that it is humid, so really? A swamp cooler?
We have a ceiling fan, and it is going to be humid (though much less hot than inland). It won’t be enough over the next few days. But we’ll probably just tough it out, as we always have.
Just leave the freezer open and put a fan in front of it 😉
Back in the day, in a lake-front Chicago suburb, our house lacked central air conditioning. It predated the wide use of force-air central heat, which makes central air easier to install, and being in “Coastal Illinois”, you didn’t really need it apart from some brutally hot and humid heat waves.
We had this one large window unit that Mom said was “a ton”, meaning it was rated at a cooling ton (the cooling equivalent of one ton of ice per day or 12,000 BTU/Hr). It may have also needed 220 V power, too, so it was set up in a window in a spare upstairs bedroom that was Dad’s office.
Don’t know given the age of the unit whether it even put out its rated cooling, but cold enough air came out of it. During these unpleasant conditions, we set up a “bucket brigade” of fans to push some of that chilled air into the other upstairs bedrooms.
Guided by that experience, I would use fans and open windows in South-Central Wisconsin except on brutal heat wave days where I would close up the house and run the A/C. The A/C unit was old, but I wondered why it wasn’t cooling the house for using at least 25 kWHr per day when I ran it, even though it condensed a lot of water.
I suffer from seasonal allergies and my doctor recommended controlling the indoor humidity. The contractors from which I took bids on replacing the old, electricity guzzling and seemingly ineffective A/C unit advised me that by opening the windows on the cooler days, I was letting in a lot of humidity, and the A/C was running and running to wring that moisture, not only out of the air but out of the house before it could begin to reduce the air temperature significantly.
An environmentally conscious engineering colleague told me that he keeps his windows closed all summer and runs his A/C at a constant 78-deg thermostat setting (yeah, yeah, I know, I know), giving a good tradeoff between comfort and energy savings.
In an effort to control indoor humidity for allergy reasons, I came up with targeting 74 degrees in the AM and letting the indoor temperature rise to 78 degrees in the PM. Letting the A/C run for blocks of time in the AM and late PM dries the house out more. It is an energy efficient strategy in that on a day with a high of 90 and a low of 70, with about a 70-deg outdoor dewpoint temperature, I can get by with 14 kWHr/day. For the summer, which maybe averages a high of 85 and a low of 62 with a similar dewpoint temperature, I average about 12 kWHr/day, which is less than what it would take to run a bunch of fans as I was doing when I had the windows open.
There is this anti-air conditioning Puritanism that air conditioning is wasteful and hence bad for the environment. Air conditioning can be run efficiently, and all of those people telling you to forgo air conditioning should listen to the advice I received.
If I didn’t have A/C I don’t know how I’d properly observe Earth Day.
We just last week moved to an apartment in San Simeon about a quarter mile from the beach, and it’s quite warm this afternoon, a blistering 82F. Oh, the humanity.
If the Federal Government is telling you that you are under an Excessive Heat Warning, you are under an Excessive Heat Warning.
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?CityName=San+Simeon&state=CA&site=LOX&textField1=35.6439&textField2=-121.19&e=0#.XzcdDqeSmcl
There are apartments in San Simeon? I thought there were only motels.
Ann found a nice place with a patio that borders right on the Hearst Ranch. Cattle and zebras graze right up to the fence. The neighbors are kinda Clampett, but not noisy.
I religiously follow power company guidelines for my thermostats; 78 in summer, 68 in winter. I have relatives in the southern hemisphere, so it’s part of my culture to use their calendar to determine what is summer and what is winter. Any arguments to the contrary are xenophobia – and racist!
You are in Arizona, I presume?
My experience in Wisconsin is with near-tropical conditions. Our summer heat waves are when the winds blow in all the humidity from the Gulf of Mexico. We had a brutally hot and humid summer in 2013 that even a family member from South Florida found oppressive.
I see Phoenix is in a heat wave where you have mid 50’s dewpoints, which would be throw-open-the-windows weather in ‘Sconsin, but your overnight low is 90-deg? Brutal.
The A/C will operate somewhat more efficient at night when it is 90 than in late afternoon when it reaches 110 degrees. There still may be some energy saving to using a lower temperature setting at night, a higher one in the day.
My wife and I are visiting relatives in Flagstaff at the moment. Yesterday, we spent the day rafting the Colorado in the Grand Canyon. We arrived at the takeout point, outside of the Canyon proper, about 4:30 in the afternoon. It was 123 F at that time.
I’d say that it was only mildly uncomfortable (especially in the shade), due to the low humidity.
You might just spring for a dehumidifier, and run you ceiling fan at night.
A lame Johnny Carson monologue joke told during a California heat wave. It went something like
“Scientists say that the surface of the planet Venus is over 864 degrees. But it’s dry!”
We used to have a portable A/C in the bedroom with the hot air hose going out the window. Worked OK but was a pain to have to set it up when required and drain the water before it overflowed onto the floor.
Certainly was worth the $3k we paid after a few years to get central A/C installed.
May not apply to you but I use 2 swamp coolers in the garage to keep the temps down in the afternoon. Garage faces west in Glendale AZ. I keep the AC downstairs at 81 during the day, the upstairs (not used much) at 85++. At 8 pm, end of peak window, upstairs AC goes on to 81.
The only time it gets miserable hot here, it is also humid. Swamp coolers are useless in those conditions. Seriously, the only rational solution is a window unit for the few days a year it happens.
Mr. Simberg, this is one of those occasions where we engineers tend to overthink things. I live in south Louisiana so I know a thing or two about the importance of air conditioning and a good night’s sleep.
Go to your nearest big box store and buy a ~5000 BTU window unit that runs on 115VAC. You’ll sleep comfortably in cool, dry air.
From the Best Buy Web site:
: QuestionHas anyone else had it stop cooling within days of purchase?
Asked 1 month ago by Tiffany.
A:Answer Air conditioners must be left to sit in their working position for 24 hours after install Before you turn it on , if the air conditioner is tipped even a little during install or transport it must sit for 24 hours to let the oil drain back into the compressor. if the oil in the compressor of the air conditioner is disturbed at all and you run it right away it will eat itself . There is high pressure oil inside the compressor and it takes time for it to drain back into the compressor. You may want to bring it back and get a new one . But this time let it sit in the window for 24 hours before turning it on . I hope this helps .
Here in San Mateo County on the northern flanks of Silicon Valley PG&E is warning us about rolling blackouts tonight because of electrical grid issues. Sheesh, California has turned into a 3rd world country.
Thank you to the “ecofreaks” for closing down nuclear power in this state in the ’70s. Had every planned nuclear plant planned in the ’60s and ’70s been built, California would have been 80% carbon neutral decades ago and we would be a net electricity exporter to surrounding states. Morons!!!
Yeah. While you’re at Home Depot picking up a window unit, grab a generator so you can run the air conditioner after PG&E cuts the power because the high temperatures represent a fire danger. Make sure the generator is large enough to also run your router, monitor, and desktop computer so you can browse real estate listings in other states.
Fortunately, our power comes from So Cal Edison.
The 9th Circuit over-turned Calis mag ban yesterday Rand.
You just got a little more free.