I’ve heard of houses or apartments used for growing illegal plants and the like, that produce a lot of heat that can be detected with infra-red detectors, etc.
Is this what could be happening here?
An apartment in the Midwest has been running a window installed A/C unit 24/7 and 365 days a year for the past 5 years… at least.
If it was during Summer then OK, but during fall and winter? With all the midwest snow? For 5 years, every day?
What the hell is going on in that apartment?
Grow-op?
Low-rent server farm?
A very cool dead guy with a lot of bills paid in advance?
I thought of a server farm, but from another viewing angle on the apartment, there’s a room facing west with huge windows and a desk with a computer on it, that I see someone once in a while typing on it.
It’s not a computer farm. It can’t be preservation of dead bodies, human, animal or anything else. It can’t be plant growing.
What the hell is it?
Could it just be the fan portion running to circulate air rather than the a/c full on?
I dunno - I got nothing…
My dad lives in Iowa. He insists on keeping the house at 69 degrees at all times. Maybe it’s one of those types?
Could be a heat/air combo unit with the fan portion running 24/7 like FairyChatMom suggested.
But why would the A/C run at 24/7 when the temp outside is the standard mid-western winter of -10 to +10 degrees F?
This thing has been running for the past 5 years, 24/7/365.
WTF?
He has a pet penguin? You could try becoming his new best friend and find out firsthand, since it sounds like you’re already looking through his windows. And unless you’re paying his electric bill, what difference does it make if he wants to run a/c all year? Maybe he has a sinus condition requiring cool circulated air.
Might be because of his neighbors. My son hasn’t had the heat on in his apartment and he’s had his window wide open through our recent cold snaps in a vain attempt to reduce the heat in his apartment to “not hot enough to boil body parts”. There is little insulation in his building and apparently his neighbors prefer the same lightly roasted temperature that his mother does while he prefers it cool.
Add a computer or two to a room and presto - a need for year round a/c
Morbidly obese people sometimes get hot very easy, not to mention the fresh air circulation helps with breathing.
Bad allergies is my guess.
In some buildings, you can’t really heat some parts comfortably without making it uncomfortably hot in other rooms. A window AC can be a way to make the room bearable.
Maybe I read the OP wrong, but I didn’t see a criticism so much as wondering why the heck someone would run a/c year round, specially in a place where it gets cold in the winter. As such, I don’t see what’s so awful about sking why someone would do that. <shrug> I’ve had neighbors who’d run their air on perfectly lovely days when I had all my windows thrown open. Maybe it was allergies. Maybe fear of the outdoors. It didn’t affect me, but I still wondered. Was that so awful of me?
Perhaps it is a heat pump.
When I worked at Hamline, just around the corner from the Security office were two Resident Employee apartments. That part of the building was so incredibly hot (and they didn’t have any ability to turn it down) that they would be running the AC unit when it was 20 below. Me, I’d just open a window, but then, when the window in question opens to a busy campus sidewalk, I could see why they might not want to. (I’d still go the open window route, but YMMV)
In one of my previous apartments, the boiler was directly below my apartment and my floor would be about 90 degrees in the winter. I kept the kitchen window open about 2-4" even on the coldest days.
Maybe the OFF button is broke.
Allergies and/or a need to dehumidify are possible. At my mom’s last apartment, there was a downstairs neighbor in a wheelchair. He had a bunch of allergies, and they ran the A/C year-round. Seems like it’d be ungodly expensive (although his might have been covered by disability anyway). Maybe some places don’t let you bring in an outside dehumidifier. Or maybe they don’t have a place to put one.
Anything weird like that is automatically a meth lab in my book.
Huge windows can produce a lot of passive heat. Also, I read about an apartment that literally baked (plastic dishes melting, etc.) after a building across the street installed a reflective faux front that sent tons of sunlight through the windows. I want to say it was a Gehry building?
ETA: found it Walt Disney Concert Hall - Wikipedia althought the dish story seems to have been hyperbolic.
I would go with this. I often turn my AC on in winter because my neighbors keep their places really blasted hot. I pretty much don’t need to keep my heat on.