The A/C Challenge is ON, Yo!

Every spring I play a little game with myself. It is called Must Wait Until As Late in the Season As Possible Before Turning the Air Conditioner On. Do you do this? I am kind of miserly when it comes to cooling and heating the house. (Oddly, I have no problem spending money on other things.) I confess that it's become a test of my toughness, only in my own mind. Early this last week, I walked out my front door and heard the humming of my neighbor's A/C, for the first time this year. I thought, "WIMP! I am mas macho!" Actually it did seem a little silly, because the weather early this week was gorgeous and cool. But Mindy is kind of like a rare orchid or precious medieval manuscript--she needs stable levels of temperature and humidity or she begins to deteriorate.

For the last two years, I've set June 1 as the date I had to get to with no A/C. I will tell you how it goes. Both years we made it, and last year I blasted right through the target date without even feeling any real pain. The main living areas of our house are on the north side, and we have these mega-turbo ceiling fans, so it stays tolerable even when it's warm outside. Upstairs, at night, we just rely on open windows, fans, and stubbornness. It helps that Matt barely notices the ambient temperature of the house, and he doesn't he know where the thermostats are or how to operate them. He just removes clothing until he reaches a comfortable personal climate. I haven't had as much success waiting to turn on the heat in the fall. For two years I've tried to get to November 1, and I only made it once. A few days of taking care of a toddler in a truly frigid house, and I'm like, "Sorry Mother Earth, they don't make Uggs I can wear on my face."

And speaking of loving the earth and all, check into this: our local power company offers to install "load management" switches on your A/C units that they can control by radio. During hours of peak usage during the summer, they'll turn off our A/C compressor for 7.5 minutes out of every 30 minutes. This can happen between the hours of 2-7PM. We lived through a couple of summers of rolling brownouts in California, and if this helps prevent that, and saves us some money, I'm fine with it. (Of course, back then, we didn't know that the whole California brownout thing had been ginned up by Enron.)

So we had the switches installed on both our A/C units--I signed up online, and the installation took like 20 minutes and happened entirely outside--and now we get a $46 rebate for each switch. That is not bad. I bet a lot of power companies are doing similar things--you might be getting leaflets about it in your monthly bill. Seriously, the first summer we lived in this house (we moved in right at the beginning of July, from a two-bedroom apartment in Northern California that didn't even have A/C), I had no idea what air conditioning did to one's electric bill. I opened the bill that first month, and I had a stroke and died, and I'm blogging now from beyond the grave, because lordy lord LORD.

Actually, for this summer, I have devised the ultimate cooling-off and power-saving strategy, and it is that just as it is getting hot as absolute butt in Atlanta, around the beginning of July, we are going to go to the Southern hemisphere, where get this, it will be winter. I don't really know how they manage that, but they must be geniuses down there. Just today I bought plane tickets for us all to go to Sydney and visit my sister and her fam for a few weeks. We had been talking about going, and then yesterday, I was innocently shopping with our mother, and Amy sent me a text message: "Buy some damn plane tickets before I unleash hell, ok?" And everyone has always thought of her as the nice one. Ha! This is the person who called me to congratulate me when she saw that my Facebook friend total went over 100. Of course, she herself has just under a kabillion friends. Sweet as sugar, that one!