Our AC has an issue.
On Saturday night, it was temperate enough to eat outside, and when we did, I heard our condenser outside wheezing a bit. It sounded like the fan was out of alignment perhaps. I worried about it a bit. The air conditioner this year has not cooled the house entirely; the upstairs has tended to be warm and the downstairs freezing (the house was built in the 1980s before zoned heating and cooling was a thing).
Saturday night was… warm. I awakened in the night with the blankets and sheets all kicked from me, and I was not cool at all.
On Sunday afternoon, I went into the little utility room that houses our furnace and our water softener and, more importantly to me at that time, the mop bucket I use to mop our cat litter/storage room. I discovered water around the furnace which generally means some problem with the a-coil. So I turned the air conditioning off at Nogglestead and toweled up the floor as best I could–the house is designed to maximize the living space, which really cramps access to a lot of the furnace and whatnot.
So we’re waiting for a new air conditioning company to come (the reason we’re going with a new company instead of the one that has serviced Nogglestead for the first decade is another story).
But the “roughing it” experience of a night without air conditioning in Missouri led me down memory lane. So, gentle reader, if you’re still reading, take my sweaty hand and come with me back to the 80s. The 1980s, not the temperature.
As you might know, I come from Milwaukee, and even now in Milwaukee, some of the older buildings and homes lack central air conditioning (which also impacts some older homes in Old Trees, where we used to live in the St. Louis area–one older house we looked at had window air conditioners in five or six of the windows on the side of the house not depicted in the listing). When we moved to St. Charles, my aunt’s home had central air conditioning which seemed like a great leap forward. Given that the St. Louis area is so much warmer than Milwaukee, this seemed necessary. But it sure was comfortable.
In the summers (I think we were there in St. Charles for two), we (my mother, my brother, and I) would go spend a week or so with our other local aunt or our grandmother. I didn’t think anything of it at the time but a mini-vacation, but it must have been either a vacation for my aunt and uncle or burden-sharing by the rest of the family. But my aunt’s house, an old brick home in South County, did not have air conditioning. And one week we spent there had high temperatures climbing well over 100 degrees every day. We spent those days in her basement, with fans blowing and the lights out, just lolling about. When you’re a kid, you have time for lolling about.
When we moved out of my aunt’s basement to the trailer park, we bought the oldest, most decrepit trailer in the park. We moved in in February, right before my thirteenth birthday. When summer came, we learned that the air conditioner in it did not work. It sat in the front wall, a little larger than your normal window unit, and would eventually cool the trailer in gradients from the coolest in the living room to still pretty warm in the back bedroom where my mother slept–unless it was summer, at which time we would all sleep in the living room. Of course, this would be after my mother saved up enough to repair the air conditioner. I don’t remember how long my brother and I spent broiling in that metal box that summer–we were not supposed to leave the trailer when my mother was not home–but it was at the very least a couple of weeks.
When my mother sold her house down the gravel road in 1995, she and her son with the worthless college degree moved back into my aunt’s house. She, the aunt, had since downsized to her aunt’s former home a couple blocks away. The house we moved into still did not have air conditioning, but my mother got a window unit in the living room/bedroom–the house did not have doors but instead arches leading from room to room, so we hung plastic sheeting to keep the cool air in the front rooms of the house. My bed was on the sun porch in the back, outside the temperate zone, so I might have slept on the floor or on the couch when it got really warm.
So I am no stranger to warm houses in the summertime, but I worried how my family would react.
My beautiful wife does not like a warm house. Many springs, Nogglestead has had a certain tension as the temperature climbed into the 80s about whether to turn on the air conditioning yet or not. I’m happy to turn it on whenever she feels uncomfortable, but she has rarely turned it on when she’s uncomfortable, perhaps because she doesn’t want me to think she’s a wuss. I have alleviated this in recent years, after over a decade of marriage, by turning it on earlier than I would if it was just me.
My boys, though, have not really experienced a home without cooling in the summer. I worried that they would be devastated, or at least very whiny, but they handled it with relative aplomb.
The drama is not over yet; I have not yet had a chance to call the new heating and cooling company. It’s probably a problem with the A coil, hopefully not too expensive, and hopefully they can get out here today.
