So I just saw a TV ad informing me that there’s been a “flex alert” here in CA which I guess is an advisory to watch your power consumption.
One of the tips: “if you must have an air conditioner, set it to at least 78 degrees.”
You WHAT? Fuck you. That’s not an air conditioner that’s a space heater. Okay I’m English so I bitch about the heat a bit faster than the average yankee doodle, but it was 77 in my office yesterday and it was too hot to get anything done. When I have AC on it’s usually set in the high 60s.
WTF? I grew up in seattle, which is basically the same weather as europe. Been here 4 years, and i’ve adjusted. 77 is perfectly fine, hell, thats pretty much the typical temperature for most of Cali.
Stop being a sissy and deal with the heat, if you didn’t constantly bathe yourself in low temperatures, you’d adapt.
I’m well 'ard me, I have my AC set to 75. I just can’t handle it any higher than that though. If there is a brownout then I’m going to have to get in the car and drive around to enjoy some AC.
Thats something else that bugs me, when these flex alerts come out, do they turn down the AC in offices at all? Nope, and i have a feeling they probably make up a good percentage of the electricity used.
(It’s the same with water shortages and fountains at public places, we’ll have a water shortage, but the local mall will still be running its fountains.)
I’ve lived in Alabama my entire life. We recently had ten or so straight days of 100+ degree temps before factoring in the humidity. The point is, it’s hot all the time and some people would have you believe that you get used to it. Perhaps you do, but 78 degrees is still hot. Turning your AC to that would be madness. My AC stays between 68 and 72 degrees.
Jojo, one of the few indulgences we’ve made for J is keeping our thermostat at 75. It definitely helps him sleep better, we’ve noticed.
Nanny walks to our place mornings and by the time she gets there she’s a bit warm and asks if I can turn the temperature down even further (and you must recall how temperate it is in our area).
Overall, we are running about 10 degrees under normal around here.
According to the little weather station I have in my back yard, the high yesterday was only 96F. Then we have some little storms blow in in the afternoon, and the temp dropped 10 degrees in about an hour, and just kept going down. I was grilling on the back porch in 79 degree weather.
I keep the thermostat at 80, but the computers keep my bedroom very noticeably warmer than the rest of the house. If I feel hot, I just go to the kitchen for a minute and do some washing up.
I keep the windows AC set at 68; power in Seattle is practically free, so why bother? Maybe if the dumbass companies making them would add some decent timer functionality other than “run for x hours or turn off after x hours” I’d be a little more interested, but I have enough fucking daily chores.
Climate-controlled clothing is the way of the future. Ice vests are a small step in the right direction.
I definitely prefer rooms to be on the chilly side. It’s easy to throw on another layer if you’re too cool, but what do you do when you’re too hot? Peel off your skin? Sure, it sounds like a good idea, but fool me once, shame on…shame on you, fool me…you can’t get fooled again.
I hate being cold. My office is too cold. I have to wrap a shawl around my shoulders like a granny, or go downstairs and sit out in the sun like a !@#$ing lizard before going back upstairs to my cold cave.
Maybe you need to upgrade your units, or not buy cheap models? I have two window A/Cs in my garage from my previous house. Both of them have the ability to set start and stop times. We used to have them set to turn off in the morning when we left, and come out about 30 minutes before we got home.
Well, if no one changes their habits you’ll end up with brownouts or rolling blackouts. Is that better?
I do think that voluntary power reduction is a tricky policy, because it encourages people to wait for other folks to reduce their usage first, so they don’t have to. Also, anything that resembles “conserve” seems to be a four letter word to most Americans.
Personally, I’m waiting for the picture of a sweating, frowny-faced Whitta holding up a melted iPhone.
I know from experience (back during that one fucked up summer in CA a while back) that brownouts and rolling blackouts are extremely sucky, especially when one of those things that goes out is the air conditioner. So suck it up, pansies. :P
