I’m happy to take the heat if it means I’m cool at night
LAST week I took the plunge and ordered an air-conditioning unit. And I honestly wish I’d done it years ago. Our bedroom is south facing, which means the sun relentlessly pours in and all the usual tips and tricks in terms of closing windows, keeping curtains shut, ice blocks in front of fans and all that jazz, does very little to ease the ferocity of what we’re told will become increasingly frequent spells of insanely hot weather.
During that absurd spell in July, when the temperature in Ashbourne reached 39C, I did everything I could to cool the bedroom down, but it was useless. On one night it was 34C in our bedroom as we turned the lights off. And that’s just not fun.
The following day the outside temperature locally dropped by around 15C, which should have been more conducive to sleep, but the problem with any house, especially one built in the 1950s, is all that searing heat from the previous day remains in the bricks. And it’s like sleeping inside a night-storage heater, with the warmth being slowly released into the room overnight.
Every window was open, and the cool breeze did help a bit, but it was still 29C in our bedroom when we embarked on another futile attempt to sleep comfortably.
Since that record-breaking heat the ambient temperature, in the Midlands at least, has been much more amiable, but there have still been a few nights with our bedroom temperature over 25C and, as I watched the weather forecast trending towards more hot weather this week, and an early threat of 30C, I decided enough was enough.
The wife and I had been flirting with the idea of a portable airconditioning unit for years. But it’s a big investment. Even a basic one is going to cost around £300, and we’d resigned ourselves to the fact we’d only use it three weeks of the year and for the remaining 11-and-a-bit months it would just be a large, ugly, expensive ornament.
But this year things have just got a bit too much. So we’ve got ourselves a rather posh new ornament which sits buzzing away in a corner of the room, with a hot exhaust pipe dangling out of a small window, cooking the Boston Ivy growing up the wall. And it’s now an absolute doddle to keep the room at a thoroughly delightful 20C.
Before you all write in, I’m completely aware this makes me public enemy number one around the environmentalists. I know all about the fact that air-conditioning units aren’t good from an emissions perspective, and I know they use a lot of electricity.
But this year we’ve decided to ditch our hot tub. We’ve also committed to using the car less and our bicycles more. And we haven’t jetted off on a foreign holiday for years. We’ve even devised a way to run all the appliances in our conservatory off a solar generator.
So, in my head at least, I feel like we’ve got some carbon credit to spend. And what better way to spend them than by investing in a good night’s sleep?
Honestly, if I clock up the number of nights I’ve struggled to polish off more than four hours in the land of nod because it’s just been so sticky and uncomfortable in my room this year, and every other year we’ve lived in houses with south-facing bedrooms (I make it 13 so far), the cost of an air-conditioning unit, divided up, becomes an absolute pittance.
Because of idiots like me puthering my refrigerated CFCs into the atmosphere, climate change is set to bring us more hot summers, more extreme heat, and more uncomfortable nights when I wake up feeling like a zombie.
I can totally accept the environmental irony, but that big white box in my room ensures I still have energy the next day to pop to Aldi on my bike instead of in my car, or to walk to a meeting rather than driving.
So as far as I’m concerned, as long as I keep finding ways to offset the impact of my air-conditioning indulgence, I won’t lose any sleep over it. Literally.
It’s now an absolute doddle to keep the room at a thoroughly delightful 20C.