Colin McEnroe Show: Turn Off The Air Conditioner!
It's hot, but do we need to always be super cool?
For five years, I lived here on Asylum Hill, on the seventh floor of an apartment building. It was a corner unit, with a weak air conditioning system, which was fine with me because I almost never turned it on.
Even in a heat wave like the one we've been having, it wasn't necessary for me to do more than shut up my bedroom and cool it individually. The rest of the place, with a sliding glass door and lots of windows, let the moving air flow in and out in a way that felt reasonably comfortable.
Whenever I stepped out into the hallway, it seemed unnaturally frigid, and I realized how much money was being spent cooling the infrastructure to a temperature that no reasonable person should expect in the summer.
So that's kind of a peeve of mine -- that and central air conditioning for huge sprawling spaces which are frequently occupied by nobody.
And if you think I'm weird, meet Stan Cox.
You can join the conversation. Are Americans over air conditioned? Why are we so afraid to break a sweat. Leave your comments below, e-mail colin@wnpr.org or Tweet us @wnprcolin.
This episode was produced by Jonathan McNicol.
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AC show
The idealized world Stan Cox presents (see his Washington Post op-ed piece) is not realistic. While I agree that we don't need to crank AC up to arctic settings, people DIE without AC (Chicago 1995, anyone?). I also don't want to sweat anywhere except in the (air-conditioned) gym. Computers don't function well in heat, so I need AC to do my job. Just as we heat our houses in the wintertime, we should be able to turn on the AC on a sweltering day. What we need are more efficient systems, more insulation, and-dare we hope?-a greener, cheaper way to provide AC.
air conditioning
After hearing Stan Cox on Marketplace and reading a review of his book last Sunday in the Courant, I blogged about this very subject in a post called "The Heat Has Obviously Gotten To Him." at the link above. While I've worked outdoors in gardening and the nursery trade for years and don't feel the need for overly air-conditioned buildings either, heat is the number 1 weather related killer, especially for vulnerable populations. We just need to turn the thermostats way down (or up, I guess it is) on the way we're cooling now.
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