I agree. The problem we have is the newer units have gotten much larger and we live in a 2-family home, thus there are 2 of them and a small pad allocated for them both. My MIL lives upstairs but lives upstate from April-Oct and that second floor unit rarely gets used. We set the thermostat at 88 in the summer just to keep the house from melting lol. Most of the time the windows are all open.
Living in NYC (Queens), the houses aren’t very far apart and my neighbor has the same exact house and setup. I’ll have to see what’s available that isn’t much physically bigger than what we have .
Our other neighbor also has the same house and set up. They had to replace one of them and it’s enormous. It’s so big that I can’t even park my car where I want to because their landscaper can’t get the lawnmower past it. it’s quite annoying…
It’s 83 and humid at the moment and it’s working just fine today and cycling (going off from time to time), with the inside thermo set at 71.
The problem isn’t the air temp, etc. I ran our 20 year old unit until it quit. My A/C tech had told me the compressor was drawing the maximum amperage and it would die soon. That was last year and he was right. We installed a new more efficient unit and our bill is about $100 a month cheaper even with rate increases. Here in Phoenix they r@pe you because they know you have to stay cool when it’s 115° outside. Ask your tech (or measure it yourself) to measure the draw from the compressor and that should tell you if it’s about to die.
Have you considered mini splits? My MIL had a zero lot line house in Rochester and we put in one of the mini splits that could be suspended on brackets on the second floor above the neighbors car port.
Yea, I would rather not change the infrastructure if I don’t have to. A simple compressor change is pretty quick, painless, and cheap. We will figure it out. The people next door are extraordinarily cheap. I have a feeling we can get something that is a decent size but might be a little more expensive. There are lots of new builds in my neighborhood and none of their units are very big and the homes are a lot bigger than mine. Clearly they passed the new stringent building codes here in NYC. New builds aren’t even allowed to have fossil fuel (gas / oil / LP) for heat. It’s all heat pumps, electric ovens, and dryers here for now on for the planet…
Just to add a little color to this. First pic is one side of my house where we have my 2 and my neighbors.
Second pic shows the ginormous replacement on the other side of my house (other neighbor). You can’t even see the other one behind it. This picture really doesn’t do it justice. Looks like something you would see on top of an apartment building or retail store. But that basically hidden unit is the same size as ours
By far my most expensive bill is gas. It obliterates my electric bill due to the furnace and tankless water heater (wife wants the last recorded temperature of Tatooine to come out of that showerhead). We have not used the gas insert fireplace because it feels like $60 just to start the damn thing.
No reason for the by product they burn off in excess to be so expensive, but hey they have to pay for this somehow, instead of letting their shareholders and CEO eat the loss. " On January 13, 2012, an independent audit from the State of California issued a report stating that PG&E had illegally diverted over $100 million from a fund used for safety operations, and instead used it for executive compensation and bonuses."
Silly monopolies…
When the furnace dies in a decade plus, I will be ditching it for whatever is the best electric option at that point. We already have electric heat in all the bathroom floors, so its not hard to heat the house already.
Kids will be gone by then, so will probably be living off grid in the forest at that point. Maybe I can get one of those liquid fluoride thorium reactors in a trailer for my neighborhood, and the wife can shower with the coolant of a nuclear reactor.
I’ve written about this particular Peace Lily before. This is a picture from today. Peace Lily’s typically have 1-4 flowers at a time when they are in bloom. This one has 17 (some you can’t see in this picture). There are 7 more buds coming up from the inside.
This plant was sent for the wake for my FIL in July of 2023 by my FIL’s much older daughter that he conceived during WWII in Panama. She found him 60 something years later. She passed away 2 weeks ago. Since then, this thing has been flowering like I’ve never seen and in a way that is not normal for this type of plant.
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence but this thing looks amazing right now. And it’s enormous… They can live 20 years or more properly taken care of. That’s the goal as it winters inside under a grow light… It has it’s own drip irrigation line and gets 3 mins of water every 12 hours and a healthy dose of miracle grow every 3 weeks…
I’m about as ‘religious’ as a rock (NOT that rock) but things happen in nature for reasons that none of us can fathom.
“I’m sure it’s just a coincidence but this thing looks amazing right now.”
I DO believe in Gibbs Rule 39 – There is no such thing as a coincidence.
I also believe in Rule 9: Never go anywhere without a knife.
Of course, I have lost one or two along the way (Statue of Liberty) when I forget we can’t do that any longer since the Government doesn’t want us being able to protect ourselves since 9/11…
Assuming the router is a networking router and not a mill (given your engraving, I have to hedge!), I would set the router, NAS, computers on battery backups/UPS units.
Natch, all your expensive electronics should be on a surge protector already, but a battery backup/UPS will give you some backup time to either a: save and close or b: coast through minor disruptions.
We had thought about doing that but were thinking a bit bigger. We want to set up a solar system big enough for the whole house and not have to rely on the grid at all.
Seconded; I will shamelessly shill for Schneider Electric’s APC (“American Power Conversion”) brand line of products, which have stood us in good stead, in multiple locations, for many, many years.
One of our sons is working out in the desert by Edwards Airforce Base building what will end up being the largest solar plant in the US.
For those that don’t know, that is in the Mojave Desert where working conditions during summer can be 110+ for days and over 100 most of the summer time.
If he ever gets a block of time, our plan is to have him set us up with solar (just have to be patient).
My sister and her husband, who live in northern Utah, have had a solar setup on the roof of their house that has produced all the electricity needed for their 3 BR house and 2 cars for several years.
They recently moved to a one-storey house, and have done the same at the new place. Convincing the HOA to allow solar panels took some doing, but opened the door for others.
Here in Manhattan, we pay about 42 cents a kw for electricity from Con-ed, so are only able to conserve our usage, as needed.
Here is the land of the sun and 110+ degree heat, it’s 15.22 cents a kw, and that’s in the summer(we have to run our HVAC approx.15 hrs daily-from 10 am to 1am from May to mid-Nov.,our supposed summer. Then we turn it off and sleep, if we can, under the ceiling fan. We have one in every room except the bathrooms/kitchen. Even one on the patio. Rich folks have two or three plus a mister.)
Don’t believe what you hear about the “dry heat”, supposedly so much more tolerable than the south’s humidity. PR to get the unwary here in the summer. If one sticks one’s head in an oven, for whatever misguided reason, it’s still hot as HELL
I kept getting empathetic inquires from my husband’s concerned relations/in-laws at my BIL’s memorial service in Dallas late June, wondering how I was holding up in the horrible heat. It was 97-99 degrees w/ matching humidity. Nice of 'em but felt like doing a jig-but refrained, due to respect for the bereaved!
Going WAY back (I’m old) we went to AZ when I was about 13 or 14. We stayed at a motel with a pool and were the only ones using it. Back then it really WAS dry in AZ because all the snowbirds hadn’t arrived and wanted freaking LAWNS that needed to be watered.
The “natives” wouldn’t let their kids go in any pools until it was at least 100+ with some humidity because they kids ‘air dried’ so fast they basically turned blue or so they claimed.
People move someplace and then force the NEW place to become what they moved from. When all those transplants succeed in destroying the water tables they may want to look up George Santayana and see how many civilizations have fallen due to the same idiocy.
We had swamp coolers when lived in a couple of Denver burbs. Doesn’t cool the whole house! Give me A/C any time!!
Spent the last month of my first pregnancy( at least seems so in my memory) in the doorway of our tri-level’s bedroom, trying to keep cool. As our family expanded, next house, bigger, fancier, had a better swamp-cooler but still only only cooled the top floor where the bedrooms were located and stairway/living room. Good thing the summers weren’t too oppressive. One rainy summer, didn’t get above 85!
Yesterday, WSJ had an article about the Europeans breaking down, putting a/c in their apt. buildings/homes though the French still think a cool living/work space an invention of the devil…
When we were in the high desert in Southern California, all we need was a swamp cooler because the humidity was rarely over 10%.
Here in West Texas, we have an ac unit which is great except for those times when our humidity is 1% and we wish we had a swamp cooler. When this happens, we use the old fashion swamp cooler … a good spraying from the garden hose cools you down every time.
