When I briefly lived in an apartment, there was once a day in which it was abundantly clear that the air conditioning went out. When it was obvious that no cool air was coming out of the vents, I called up the main office to see if I could get someone from maintenance over to come fix it. However, it was a Sunday, and the office hours were drastically reduced, and I was unable to actually get with a human being on the phone, and I thought that I was going to be boned until Monday.
I tried to stick it out, but didn’t last more than 30 minutes before I began looking through drawers for the information packet that was given to us when moving in, to see if there were any alternative numbers to call, or if I could get to maintenance directly or something. I found an emergency number and figured it wouldn’t hurt to call and get a human being on the line to see if they could point me in the right direction.
When I got a person to pick up, I explained my situation, and they asked me to tell them what the thermostat read. “83,” I told them, and they responded with “I’ll be right over. 82F is what we consider to be an emergency.”
In less than an hour, a maintenance guy showed up, turned out a freon recharge was all that was needed, and then the entire apartment began cooling down pretty quickly afterward.
The point of this little story is that I just read this article about what Energy Star recommended people keep their thermostats at, in order to save energy:
- 78F while you’re home
- 85F for when you’re away
- 82F for while you’re sleeping
All I have to say about all those numbers is, fuck. no.
78F is what I have my thermostats set to while the wife and I are at work, and just thinking about how sweltering hot it is on days in which I forget to toggle it down remotely (they’re still new, so they’re still “leaurning” our routine) makes me feel sweaty and uncomfortable. Having the house be that temperature while we’re actually home is basically asking me to go rotisserie cook myself.
And to set it to 85F while we’re gone? Absolutely not. I’ve already been conditioned to learn that 82F is an emergency, and my house has several pets; I understand that it’s good to try and save energy, but I also care about the comfort and well-being of the animals, and I don’t want them to roast inside of a cheapskate house because Energy Star says an emergency level temperature is adequate enough for a house devoid of humans.
Even if I didn’t have pets, there’s no god damn way I’d be setting my house to be 85 degrees. Aside from how miserable it would be by the time any human being walks in the door, I’d be all paranoid of letting the thermostat go so lethargic, that I’d be fucking the hardware for when I needed it to run in maximum overdrive in order to get the entire range back down 13-15 degrees in a short amount of time.
And 82F while sleeping? Fuck that too. Personally, sleeping is way easier when it’s on the colder side of things, because I can always get under the sheets and get warm if it’s cool, but the same cannot be said if it’s warm. A person can strip themselves naked and sprawl out over the sheets, when it’s warm, there’s only so much one can do to relieve themselves from it.
The bottom line is that Energy Star is out of their got damn mind with these suggested temperatures. I know it’s not doing the world any good to have old freon gas-using units out there, but as much as humans may be destroying the planet, they’re also coming up with newer technologies that are capable of cooling without the same amounts of pollution. But I guess there’s no way to really sugar-coat the fact that me, along with probably millions of other people who are used to the luxuries of air conditioning, are just too accustomed to being cooled on demand, and are unwilling to give it up.
