I have a confession to make. I had to work on the Fourth of July, and I was in no hurry to make it a short day at the office.
That’s because our home had become a sauna the night before when the central air conditioning went out.
If you are going to have air conditioning problems, there may be no worse time than on the eve of a holiday.
The first sign of trouble came late Wednesday afternoon. I was off that day, which was the holiday for those of us in the newsroom who were scheduled to work on the Fourth to put out the Friday edition.
My wife, Betty Gail, noticed that the temperature inside our house was rising above the setting on the thermostat. We had had the unit serviced six weeks earlier, when we were informed that an evaporator coil had started leaking Freon and that the manufacturer had stopped making replacement parts for that discontinued model. They recharged the Freon and told us that if the unit froze up again, we should turn it off for a half-hour to let the coil thaw while the fan continued to run, then turn the unit back on.
That worked — once.
Sometime Wednesday night, the cool air stopped again, and several attempts to restart it were unsuccessful.
Knowing that the holiday was no time to call for service, we decided to tough it out rather than evacuate to a hotel.
I went to work early Thursday morning, leaving Betty Gail and our son, Sam, to cope with the situation.
By the time I got home for lunch, they were already looking wilted.
All of the rooms except the bathrooms in our house are equipped with ceiling fans, but those seemed to mostly push the hot air around. We turned off most of the lights inside, and tried to only sparingly use any appliance that might generate heat. The refrigerator didn’t like the conditions much either. The digital readings on the front showed both the refrigerator and freezer rising well above their normal settings, only to fall back down, then rise again.
Besides the ceiling fans, we are blessed — or sometimes cursed — with a swimming pool. Betty Gail and Sam spent a good part of the day outside, taking a dip whenever they got too hot, then returning to the shade to let the evaporation provide some additional cooling relief.
That only worked so well, though, because the days of high temperatures and humidity had made the water in the pool feel closer to lukewarm. And by nightfall, the mosquitoes eliminated the outdoors as an option.
“This is pretty miserable!” Betty Gail texted me.
The experience had me thinking back on how limited air conditioning was during my childhood in Kansas City, Kansas, where the temperatures get just as high as in Mississippi, but the humidity is not as bad. Only the newer homes at that time were built with central air, and people flocked to stores in the summer not only for their merchandise but for the break the air-conditioned buildings provided from the heat.
For most of my early years, our family’s two-story house only had one large window unit, located in the downstairs dining room. My sisters tell me, although I don’t remember this, that the bedrooms were equipped with window fans, turned outward to suck hot air from the house.
Still, it could get oppressively hot, particularly upstairs, where the bedrooms were located for my six siblings and me. At night, during the hottest part of summer, the children would sprawl out on pallets in the dining room and adjacent living room, the only really cool parts of the house. A particularly choice spot was the long window ledge next to the air conditioner, if you could claim dibs on it.
What I would have done for a window unit like that Thursday night.
It got up to 93 degrees inside and by daybreak had only cooled down to 88. I slept — or tried to — on the top of our bed covers, wearing only a pair of gym shorts. The sweaty night was made even more fitful by our cat, Pumpkin, who was sent into a foul mood by the heat and the fur coat she couldn’t shed. Every hour or so, she would jump on the bed and give me a nip, until I had enough and put her outside, where she was probably better off anyway.
At some point, Betty Gail resorted to the one place on our property where she knew she could get a respite from the heat: her car.
She opened the garage door so the exhaust fumes could safely escape, and sat in the car for 10 minutes or so, relishing in its air conditioning.
Friday morning, before most businesses opened, we started plotting a strategy of what we might do — and whom we might call — if our normal A/C contractor had shut down for a four-day holiday weekend.
Thankfully, he didn’t. It was determined that the capacitor — the part that provides the initial jolt of electricity to an air conditioner’s motors — had gone out. A comparatively inexpensive replacement later, and our house was soon back to livable again.
I’m not sure we would tough it out the next time, even for a day, during such a severe heat spell. But the roughly 36 hours without air conditioning certainly restored my appreciation for that marvelous invention of the early 20th century that improved lives and transformed economies. It also reinforced my sympathy for the homeless and the tiny percentage of homes in the South that still live without it, or the larger percentage that can’t afford to run it all the time.
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
