Climate and energy

According to EnergyStar.gov, heating and cooling costs make up 49% of the average homeowner energy budget. Air conditioning makes up about 15% of that.

According to ACEEE, energy consumption for home air conditioning accounts for almost 5% of all the electricity produced in the U.S., costing homeowners over $15 billion. It also producing roughly 140 million tons of fossil fuel carbon dioxide emissions per year.

And according to every utility person I have ever talked to, summer is a time of peak load when everyone has the AC running, and this draw is a big part of why additional fossil fuel burning power plants are still on the drawing board.

All this totals up to one really horrible fact – an environmentally responsible homeowner should strive to use their AC as little as possible. You can do this in several ways:

- Seal and weatherstrip your home
- Install a programmable thermostat to raise the AC temperature when no one is home, and to lower it before you return
- Only run the AC when the temperature is over 90 degrees, or later in the summer when it doesn’t cool off at night
- Install an energy-efficient AC, energy-efficient windows, and insulation
- Use fans instead
- Sweat it out.

Or… you can accidentally do as Maril and her husband did. You can start remodeling your kitchen in late June, realize that the whole ceiling (drywall, insulation, the whole schmeer) needs to go and really, you might as well rewire ALL the ancient wiring while you’re at it (firefighters tend not to like bad wiring, there was no hope of just covering that stuff back up) ….

… and then you are living in an uninsulated shell of a house (more like a barn, really), and what’s the point of using your AC then? Why air condition the great outdoors?

And then it becomes July. And then your drywall guy flakes on you and there’s the July 4 holiday and the other folks can’t get to it until afterwards. And then oh yeah, you and your husband both work outside the home. Remodeling when day jobs are involved is not the easiest thing. And did you know that an attic fan doesn’t really work well when there’s no attic? Not kidding.

Thus for the past week or so we have been exploring the sweat it out option.

The good news – you adjust. I’ll admit it, I’m normally a wimp. Usually our AC solution is to keep it at 78 degrees, just to keep the edge off. It’s been a bit above 78 degrees in Kansas lately, you may have noticed.

However, since it’s always cooler outside than inside now (until about 8:00 p.m.), we’re spending lots more time outside. Gardening, walking, messing with the biodiesel, whatever. This is has got to be healthier than sitting around on your rear indoors in the AC, I figure. And you end up actually talking to your neighbors. Imagine.

And really. You do adjust to the lack of AC. You may not be happy about it but you adjust. I had a friend give me a major reality check the other day, too. I griped, and the response was: “Oh yeah? Well right now in Iraq it’s about 120 degrees in the shade.”

I said, oh. Well. I do believe you are right. Gulp.

Then someone else pointed out that when the families started to return to Greensburg after the tornado last year, about that time Kansas would have been heading right into summer, and there sure wasn’t any AC there then. And do you think that everyone in Chapman has AC right now? Probably not.

So! Yeah. What are we griping about, again?

— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org