Air Conditioning in My Home - Keeping Cool

We've lived in this house since 2002 and we have had numerous methods of cooling the house down.

The house came equipped with a central air conditioning unit, but the venting in the house was never completely installed so there are rooms that have air conditioning and there are others that simply pretend to have it.

We have a couple window air conditioners that fit in the windows upstairs. It was convenient when the kids lived at home for each of them to run their own conditioner in their own rooms the temperature that they wanted it.

We had our bedroom downstairs and had our own window air conditioner also.

Last year, we saw an advertisement for the portable window air conditioners that have a special vent in a window and you can supposedly move them from room to room. My husband thought it would be great to throw in a vehicle and bring up north to the cabin when we'd vacation up north.

That didn't happen. There is fine print that they neglect to point out to you when you buy these units.

It didn't move from the window all winter. We installed the vent tube and when winter came, we simply closed the storm window.

I have a slightly non-funny story about what happened the other day when I started up the air conditioner.

My husband would have noticed it a lot sooner than I did, but he's not home during the week. So, here I was. It was hot in the house. About 83 degrees. It should have been closer to 69 degrees according to the air conditioner's read out.

But it was not.

Why not? Well. It's because I failed to open the storm window.

I walked over to the air conditioner and pointed it a different direction. I adjusted the temperature and discussed the situation with coworkers. One said that they had a tank that kept filling up with water. Almost a worthless machine she said.

My machine doesn't do that. Another coworker said that there was a heater of some sort that got rid of the water out the vent. Yeah. Apparently that's why my window was a very hot to the touch window when I discovered my storm was closed.

I opened the storm window and - yes - that did make a huge difference. The air conditioner actually cooled the house down to 76 degrees, which I can handle. I'm actually tempted to put on a sweatshirt while typing this, since I think that it is cold in here now.

Our central air conditioning unit has not run for a few years. The kids have both moved out, five years ago and those air conditioner units that used to go in the windows, are sitting unused. We did install a steel roof and a lot of pink insulation so the upstairs is fairly cool now.