For many years, the wife and I have lived in Seattle and sweated it out during the summer. You may think “Are Seattle summers hot enough to need air conditioning?”
For many years, the answer was no. Seattle does get hot summers (30 degrees Celsius) for 1, 2, or even 3 weeks at a time. But for years that wasn’t that common. Most people in Seattle just lived with the discomfort because summers didn’t get that hot and it didn’t last all that long. Furthermore, for ourselves, we lived in the ground floor of a condo and that stays a lot cooler anyway.
Well, a couple of years ago we moved into the house we’re living in now. That was in September and I noticed that it was warm. The next year, 2014, was too hot. Our bedroom is upstairs and we had to sleep with a fan on all night because it was too hot there. Then, in 2015, it was just as bad and the entire summer I threatened to get an air conditioner but we never did. I figured we could tough it out, and we did. But it sucked.
Well, this year, this past May, we got a portable air conditioner from Costco. It’s a big and heavy thing, and you have to vent it out the window. But, we took it upstairs and while it’s a bit loud, it works great.
Seattle didn’t really have warm weather this year for long stretches until the third week in July. We were thinking to ourselves “Yeah, we got this $450 air conditioner and it’s not even hot.”
Well, it’s hot now. And we do use it, and it’s fantastic. I say to wife “Why didn’t we do this earlier? I don’t want to have to sweat so much!”
Because we bought it two months ago, we were prepared for the hot summer weather when it came. We planned ahead on that one.