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Electricity prices climbing faster than inflation.
(www.npr.org)
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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
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That's nice for you that you aren't as susceptible to temperature as some of us. I live in an area where it can regularly reach the fun extremes for both winter (single digits) and summer (high 90s with humidity). I happened to live through too many snow/ice storms that went through here growing up to make me able to stand outside with a t-shirt and jeans in 50F and be fine, yet I can't stand temps above 72F during the summer for more than a couple hours at best, meanwhile my sister and mom can't stand temps below 76F in the winter. Also since I'm one of the "freaks" who willingly works nights, I kinda want to be able to sleep on the summer days so my window AC unit hovers around 66F to 64F just so i can try to sleep comfortably.
Whatever did we do before cheap oil and coolants gave us the ability to bend the climate completely to our will, to the point where we make it so cool indoors in many public buildings that you need to wear a hoodie in the summer? I like the winter and the summer because I don't have to add or subtract layers throughout the day, lots of places make this impossible because they just have to make it too hot in the wintertime and too cold in the summertime to wear your outdoor clothes inside.
How could humans ever have survived in the days before circa 1950 when such an essential, vital technology was popularized?
I wonder this all the time and I live in a climate with similar extremes to yours.
At any rate, I don't suppose you spend $500 during July and August cooling your room down to 66 F. $500/month in electricity takes effort, you need to be cooling a large amount of space that nobody is occupying, and running a large number of appliances.
Some literally didn't. You see this every time there's a heat wave, the elderly and other vulnerable people literally fucking die.
Did they die of not being able to use 4000 watts every hour of the day (which we've only been able to do for 80 years), or did they die of not having cool enough air (which we have been very capable of providing for 8000 years)?
We need to be wary of this logic of "we need the things that we have developed in the age of capitalism".
66F to 64F is like 18-19°C?! I'm sorry but this is extremely low in summer. This is exactly what the comment above you is talking about, like at 19°C it's cold enough to wear two layers on your torso if not doing physical activity. You seriously need to acclimate yourself to higher sleeping temperatures in summer, it can be done.
or maybe their house is like a sieve and the only way to keep the room temperature normal is to blast the AC.
also, huge windows, no (or not enough) overhangs, no outside shutters (curtains and blinds are dogshit lies). a shitton of housing stock was not designed for any kind of real climate.
There is a difference between setting the AC unit to 65F and having the room at 65F. I have no problem with the former if it's the only way to maintain normal temperatures, but if it's the latter it's wasteful
Good lord the house me, my parents, and my 3 siblings live in is complete disaster. The building started life in the mid to late 1800s... as a single floor funeral home with a crematorium in the basement. Then sometime it got rezoned to be a house, and expanded on so much that it became a two floor sorta two family home since it technically is two addresses (the first floor is house number and the 2nd floor is house number and a half, including the fact it has two electric meters, two gas meters, and so on), now the quality of these expansions wildly varies though mostly on the bad side, like on the level of we're sure it may just end up being cheaper to just tear it down and build a new house than spend forever (and money we don't have) chasing all the issues it has.
Now, I mentioned that my mom and sister can't stand temps below a certain point, during winter due to again probably the quality of the expansions, my room just holds onto heat all the time, meanwhile my mom's room and sister's room seem to not exactly hold onto heat very well. You can start seeing where the problems start creeping up. So that window unit is pretty much the only thing keeping my room at a semi regular temperature during both summer and winter.
yeah, it can be ridiculously expensive to make an old house airtight after the fact. tear off all the cladding and possibly the roof too, airseal the whole fucking thing from foundation to the top, then rebuild the outside. something like that.
and that's just airtightness, but what about insulation?
It's far beyond old house we're dealing with here, the expansions the original building had went through includes near doubling the foundation footprint, gutting it and changing it probably several times throughout it's life, like the stairs to the 2nd floor when the 2nd floor was added was originally on the other side of the house, not to mention the addition of the backrooms on the first floor that wasn't integrated with the rest of the first floor in terms of air circulation. And for the fun part, there's asbestos in the house, how much? We know the answer is "Yes" for sure, and I'm pretty sure the insulation has asbestos in it too.
Like from what my dad had told me, the city documents for the property shows that the building had been expanded, changed, and added onto at least 20+ times throughout it's life.
oh awesome, that means that tearing it all down and starting from scratch is even more expensive, cos you gotta hire someone to safely bag the asbestos. or do it yourself and die from cancer in a decade.
The only reason we know there's asbestos in the house is because we were going to tear all the carpet in the house out before moving in, then we began to find asbestos underneath several layers of flooring under the carpet in the back room of the first floor, which made us decide to not rip up that one carpet in the back room at all. As for the insulation, I'm not exactly 100% on my assumption of it having asbestos too, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
Sure would be a bad time to learn that the metal roof was leaky in one spot, and would cause us have to set up a drip bucket in the attic that would have to be emptied out every time it rained, and said attic space had all the insulation completely exposed to open air, and didn't have the money to properly deal with that issue for several years....
Before I finally got a window unit for my room, I was regularly sweating, in just underwear, with no covers. And remember, I'm a night person working night shift so heat was that much worse because I have to sleep during the daytime hours. It was fucking awful, and I have a lot of choice words to say to you if you decide to be judgemental about it.