Sammy,

I am so sorry your maintenance company has let you down and that their 24-hour-waiting-policy is not being followed. And I am REALLY sorry your AC is out--that's our biggest fear every summer--that the AC will go out on the hottest day of the year.

I hope venting helped.

Our AC went out during the bad wildfire summer of 2006 and it went out on a day when we'd been gone to wildfires all day long and came home, totally exhausted, to a very hot house (95 degrees when we arrived home at midnight). Our local HVAC genius (coincidentally a retired professional firefighter from the Dallas area) came and fixed it immediately the next morning when we called him and we were so appreciative. I believe a dependable, reliable HVAV person who keeps his word is worth his weight in gold.

I hope they get it fixed tomorrow so life can get back to normal.

Dawn

Thank you Dawn. Maybe there is some magic in venting. He just left. I called them back today, and said I wanted to be sure that I was on the waiting list even if they were coming tomorrow. I asked if she would please call me back, and I promised not to tell her how much I needed her.

The guy just left. 95 degrees inside is just awful. We are at 84, and are really sweating. It may be higher than 84, because I can hardly function, and I work outside as much as I can. There is a huge difference between outside heat and inside heat, especially since I threw away all the screens.

SAmmy

I can definitely sympathize with you. Our house was built in 1936 and apparently they didn't have the foresight to make room for central air duct work, darn them, so we have to suffer several window units. When our upstairs unit went out in our bedroom in the middle of summer, I thought we would die. We couldn't afford to buy a new one for a few months, so we had to get by sleeping in the heat. It makes you wonder how humans have survived this long in the south without electricity. It also really brings home issues of energy shortage and peak oil that may effect us in the future. Luckily, our house has some mature trees that shade much of the afternoon/late afternoon sun, or i'm sure it would have been much worse. Hang in there!

-Matt

Welcome to my world folks. :^D
Our lovely little house is so old the wiring won't handle more than one window unit. Since DH was working on pipelines and was away for weeks at a time, I decided to put the AC in DD's room. Me, I can always nap in the mornings while it's still relatively cool. But she's a full time student, and with as much as tuition costs, she can't afford to be tired and distracted from not being able to sleep because of the heat. Besides, there's no outlet close enough to put one in my window anyway.

30 days of no measurable rainfall along with the 90 and 100 degree temps have made it a bit miserable at times, but it's not unbearable. Close off the rooms on the south side of the house, and keep the doors shut to the rising and setting sun. You tend to get out and check the animal's water more frequently, (and get sloppy with the hose - ha), and when it gets really unbearable, there's always Sulpher or Tishimingo or Blue River. ;^)

I always wonder how people further south (as in, Mexico, Central and South America) manage without electricity for even a fan. You're right, Matt, it really gets you thinking about peak oil and civilization as we know it. ;^)

I will tell you, the cool front that blew in last night is an absolute Godsend, and we've been enjoying the free ac all day. Life is good.

Sammy,

I think our house hit 95 degrees on that day a few years ago and stayed there because the high was like 107 or 108 and we were out fighting grassfires all day, so no one was home opening doors or windows or turning on fans or anything. Once we arrived home and opened up all the windows and doors and turned on ceiling fans, the temp inside dropped to about 85. Still, it was too hot to sleep, especially since we'd been fighting fires all day in horrid conditions.

Our A/C guy came almost as soon as Tim called him and had the A/C fixed in a few hours. That man is worth his weight in gold!

And, now, for the rest of the story.....

Sometime Sunday night or early Monday morning, Tim woke up and thought the house felt hot. (Maybe he was feeling paranoid because I told him your A/C had gone out.) He went downstairs and started checking and discovered the fan wasn't blowing air....then he went outside and the compressor had ice built up on it. So, he turned off the A/C, waited until the ice melted, turned it back on and came back to bed a couple of hours later.....

On Monday morning, he called our A/C guy about 9 a.m. and left a message that our A/C was acting up. We didn't really expect to hear from him that day, knowing he probably had a backlog of calls from the weekend. Shortly after 11 a.m., I stepped out on the screened-in porch to feed Yellow Cat, and there was our friend and HVAC genius, waving cheerfully and telling me he was going to check the compressor first. To make the story short, he had figured out the problem, fixed it and headed off to the next call in less than an hour's time. I'm telling you, he walks on water and we're so lucky to have him not just as our local HVAC technician, but as our friend.

I did find it ironic our unit went out on the same day we'd discussed yours going out.

Matt, I've asked my older relatives that very question....how did they survive without air conditioning and they all gave the same basic answer....they didn't know what air conditioning was and you can't miss what you've never had.

When Tim and I got married in the early 1980s, we bought a house just up the block from my parents house. It was built in the 1940s so had no central heat or air. We put in central heat as soon as we closed on the house and then added the air conditioning a couple of years later. For that couple of years that we had window units, the house was more or less adequately cooled, but it was so much better once we put in the central AC. The funny thing? My parents had window units and didn't realize what they were missing. As soon as they saw how uniformly cool our house was, they put in a central HVAC system in theirs, saying "we would have done this 25 years ago if we'd known it would feel this good". It made me laugh.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, we didn't even have the window AC units except in the living room. We had those old evaporative coolers called swamp coolers in each bedroom, and if they ever cooled the bedrooms off, I couldn't even tell it.

Littledog, You certainly have my sympathy. I cannot imagine getting through these hot summers with only 1 window unit, but I admit to being spoiled. Once you're used to always having a cool house, it is hard to go without it. I'd rather be cold in winter than hot in summer.

I hope the spell of cool weather lasts a while so you can enjoy it. I know Oklahoma weather too well to believe the heat is suddenly 'gone' just like that, but maybe at least the highs in the 100s won't return.

Dawn

Somehow I survived 18 and am better for having done it, but I could never do it again.

I get a laugh out of the old threads coming back to life.

Even though this thread is five years old, central heat and air for houses didn't exist in 1936. AC for any buildings except maybe movie theaters and hotels barely existed.