No way in hell … I can’t control my body temp too well and suffer from heat. I would rather sit snuggled in a sleeping bag dressed in medieval clothing [nothing like clothing designed for no central hear in a small ice age for keeping warm] reading a book by lantern light than trying to figure out how to strip off my skin to get even 1 degree cooler with no AC. I have actually sat in the bath with ice floating in it trying to get my temp down when I have had the power go out [we have a large freezer and to keep it more efficient we make blocks of ice when teh food content gets low]
When it’s hot like this, I’m always grumbling under my breath, “If that damn 'lectricity goes out, I’ma get mah gun and shoot up er’body!”
I’m pretty tolerant to the heat. It’s in the 100s in Richmond (with the heat index), and I’m doing fine with only my rickety fan blowing from across the room. But at night? When I go to sleep? The window unit must be on. The room must be cold enough so that I have to bury myself under the covers. Any sweat or stickiness on my skin will keep me awake all night. In this one regard, I’m absolutely a spoiled baby. I’m a hard-core ascetic in everything else in my life.
So I hear you, sister. I hear you.
I grew up in a house without A/C. Solutions in order of effectiveness:
- Move your mattress into the basement and camp out down there.
- Open up all the windows at night and shut them at the crack of dawn. You’ll seal the cooler night air in and keep the interior temp lower (for a while at least)
- Close the blinds (especially south facing windows)
My friend in Waukegan was told today that they would be without power until Friday.
At least Comcast got their shit together while I was at work today and is back ip and running here in E-town.
Don’t bother with one of those gasoline powered ones. They are a total pain, and very expensive in the long run. If you have natural gas going to your home, get a natural gas genny. Have it plumbed in and you won’t have to do anything. They start at about 5 grand, but if you get the right sized one, your home will be the one with lights on, freezers working and the AC working.
There are a lot of areas in the country that are slab built, no basements or if there are nonslab houses [like mine] they have shallow crawl spaces that may or may not be cement floored [I have a modified older farm house that has a dirt and bedrock crawlspace that ranges from 14 inches to roughly 3 and a smidge feet]
We live in a neighborhood with underground power lines, and shifting soil. We lose power frequently so I invested in a small generator. It only produces 115V (no 220) and can power a room A/C, or a few fans, some lights, my TV and computer/modem (and of course my refrigerators). I had it wired so that one “side” of my house* is energized when the switches are thrown. It’s very very very (<- can’t say this enough) important that your generator wiring isolate the house from the city electric grid when it’s in use. Otherwise you’ll be endangering the linemen when they work on the power lines.
The genny is gas powered and is an “inverter” type. As I understand it, this uses electronic wizardry to produce a true sine-wave current rather than the square-wave produced by cheaper gensets. This supposedly ensures that computers, tvs, and more sensitive electronics will operate. I’m told that nowadays, many refrigerators and air conditioners contain circuit boards and must have the “cleaner” sine wave. I’ll leave this to the board’s experts to clarify. It’s one of these. Since it’s portable, we can mount it in the RV so it does double duty as our power source when we’re camping in the boonies.
I paid about $1500 new for it, and got the wiring done via the good-ole-boy network (relative is an electrician). I can’t say whether the expense was worth it, I just wanted some comfort when the power’s out. I thought I had everything under control power-wise, but still managed to lose 80 pounds of venison this spring when a power surge caused my game freezer to shut off (didn’t notice it till it was too late).
Sorry if TMI, but you asked. 
There have been winter outages in my rural county that left some people without power for as long as 11 days, a couple years ago. Outages of more than two days are almost common.
It builds character.
I’m the exact same way. I actually hate Summer weather if it gets much above 85 degrees and there’s humidity as it often does here in the Ohio River Valley. I love cool, cold air. Winters do not bother me, temperature-wise.
Agreed, but as someone who was without power for 30 hours, I can attest - this isn’t the same as living without AC. I’ve done that, too. This is living without AC and fans of any kind. The air in my apartment was dead still. I opened the window and it was still hotter and thicker outside so I just shut the windows again and dealt with it. Oh well.
Luckily, mine came back at about 1:30 pm yesterday. By the time I got home from work and work events at 10:30 pm, my air was moving nicely and my cats were much more comfortable. Now tonight I get to go grocery shopping to replace all the food I lost. Yay!
I can live without air conditioning, I did it for a full month through the nasty 90+ degree May weather we had this year. But in that case, I have a box fan AND pedestal fan cranking on me at full blast all night long. I can’t sleep outside the covers very well. I need a breeze. I do still MUCH prefer A/C if possible, though; humid air messes with my sinuses and makes me congested in the morning–not good.
Last night it was much cooler and tonight will be even cooler, fortunately. UNfortunately, I just got the ETA for our power coming back on–Thursday at 11:59pm. I assume that’s a pesstimate (pessimistic estimate) and that it’ll probably come on sometime Thursday afternoon. Still, that puts us beyond 72 hours, and I’ve STILL not gotten a good night’s sleep since Saturday night. I spent at least another hour tossing and turning, and my sleep paralysis came back, and my nightmares are always worse when I have to sleep in the dark and quiet. I am a very cranky Spanky, right now. Q_Q
I’ve had a decent home-sized generator for the server room at work (I think it was a 45kW model?) and I honestly think they’re a pain in the ass.
First of all, they put out incredibly dirty power, so if you want computer or serious electronics equipment to work right you’re going to need to have some kind of UPS or filters or something in there. Second of all, you have to pick whether you want a natural gas one (clean, can be hooked up to the gas line and needs no fuel tank, but vulnerable to gas line failures) or diesel/propane (expensive to run, needs a fuel tank). Third of all, they need a lot of supporting gear that can be somewhat to very dangerous–you need a bigass transfer switch, either automatic or manual, to switch between grid and generator power–and electricians charge and arm and a leg, because of all the double-checking they have to do to make ABSOLUTELY sure you can’t backfeed power onto the grid. Fourth, you are going to want to get it inspected yearly. Fifth, you are going to want to have it do a self-test and run for 15min periodically. We did it once a week–you can do this on a timer, but it still burns fuel.
amg, estimate bumped up to tonight at 10pm. Here’s hoping <3
After we had straight line winds in the summer of '03, there were a fair number of professors and GA’s that slept in their offices at my university. (Since the school has its own power, they got it up running pretty damn fast). The power was out at my house, so my parents suggested I stay with them in Arkansas so I did.
My aunt’s old house(now my sister’s) is right next to a retirement and nursing home for very wealthy people. They always get their electricity back first.
That’s what I was going to say. Loss of all vital utilities doesn’t mean the same thing to most people as it does to people here apparently. Dopers are a clever bunch though. They are probably just pissed that they had to drag out the old homemade bicycle AC generator and rig up an old Speak&Spell to be a satellite internet uplink. I can see how the hassle would tick someone off. I will be sure to check this board first in case of nuclear war for helpful tips.
This is what I love about the Straight Dope. I had no idea there was a Basement Expert here. I’d love to hear more about basements.
Yup. I have pet rabbits that start suffering in the high 70s, and may start dying above that. I was going to take them down to the basement if the power outage lasted another day, as the house would have heated up by then (it’s pretty well-insulated). After that, I probably would have looked for a hotel that accepted pets, or paid the woman who boards my rabbits when we’re on vacation to take them for a bit.
If the AC had merely gone out and we couldn’t replace the unit for a couple days, I would have just bought a big-ass block of ice, put it in a basin next to the rabbit cage, and put a fan on it to spread the convective cooling effect. No power is far, far worse than no AC.
My coworker from Cyprus has it worse off. Someone decided it would be a good idea to store 2 kilotons of seized munitions next to the main power plant on the island, and not make any efforts to reduce or maintain the pile for 3 years. Recently, it blew, and since then he has had power only about 50% of the time.
Supposedly, ComEd has all of these crews working to restore power, yet I have driven to nearly everywhere within a 30 mile radius of my home (trying to kill off boredom by staying out of my house) without seeing even one crew working. If there are so many crews out there, then where in the hell are they. I have been without power since Monday Morning @ around 8am, and they are telling us that they estimate they will have our power restored on Friday 7/15 by 12pm. WTF?!?! Nearly everyone in our town has power. The people across the street from us have power, in fact everyone on the opposite side of he street has power! My gf, who lives about 3/4 of a mile away, is without power also. ComEd is a joke. They always have been. They don’t have any real competition in the area, so why would they make any changes? It would be great if everyone who was or has been without power for more than 24 hours, just banded together and didn’t pay their ComEd bill for two months. I think they would get the message.
A tip I got from an earlier thread is to fill a few plastic jugs with water and stick them into your freezer as an emergency coolth supply. If you’re careful not to open it too much, these will keep it cold through several days of outages. This works best with a chest freezer, though, where the cold air doesn’t fall out when you open the door.