Not pit worthy, just my annual whining about humidity.
I’m a Western U.S. girl transplanted to New Jersey. I love every season but summer here is like several months of being shut in a dryer with damp clothes. Out West it may be 90 degrees, but sweat actually evaporates and cools one off.
The humidity and related barometric pressures give me headaches and sinus issues. Just a half hour of lawn mowing makes me feel like I’m going to die of heat exhaustion. Our old house isn’t suitable for installing central air, so I huddle around the AC units and sleep poorly at night due to the AC noise and the stuffy nose the moving air/allergens cause. I’m an outdoorsy type, but summers here find me scuttling from house to car AC to work AC.
Yeah, my first visit to Hawaii, as I walked off the plane, I thought I’d walked into an enclosed laundry room. But if you’re on vacation, just wear shorts, T-shirt and flip flops. You adjust. But it was weird if I was driving around and then stopped to do or see something. My sunglasses would immediately fog completely over.
For much of the time, the trade winds blow most of the humidity away in Hawaii. I’ve lived in Hawaii, and I live in Thailand, and believe me when I say Thailand’s climate is positively brutal compared with Hawaii. The climate in Hawaii is simply fantastic most of the time. I will not miss the climate in Thailand at all when I move back to Hawaii this August.
When I lived in Hawaii, locals were fond of pointing out the temperature had never reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit, not once since the start of record keeping. I don’t know if that was true, but it certainly felt true for my 2-1/2 years there. I don’t recall it ever being blistering hot, whereas during this year’s hot season in Thailand, we approached 120 degrees Fahrenheit a few times.
No, Hawaii is about as perfect a climate as you could possibly hope for, and I’m looking forward to it again. I just hope global warming has not screwed it up during my absence.
I’ll add that I never had air conditioning in Hawaii and never missed it. If I did not have air conditioning here in Bangkok, I’d just shoot myself and be done with it. No, the two climates are as different as night and day. Apples and oranges.
Look into the “Mini Split” A/C - a small external compressor runs an indoor unit, usually placed over a door or window.
I don’t know about current units, but the first gen were sold as “yeah, but not as noisy as window A/C’s”.
These are marketed pretty much directly to DIYer’s: “tell us how long the tubing has to be and we’ll cut and flare the tubes and pre-install the required amount of coolant”
Emphasis on the coolant - the part where you have to call a Pro - you cannot legally buy buy coolant (“Freon”) without an EPA license, and the tools required cost thousands.
With the coolant already measured and installed, you bypass that step.
HVAC folks hate these, and will charge the same to install one as they would to install something they provide.
I kept misreading the thread title as “My annual diatribe on humanity” and was wondering what it is about humanity that upsets Jennshark regularly every year.
When I go to Bangkok, I always stay in the same hotel, which has big windows that I can open so I never need to turn on the AC. Sleeping is very pleasant, so is walking around during the day. A casual walk of an hour or so is not uncomfortable.
In the humid tropics, it rarely gets above about 92, pretty much like New Orleans in summer. Overnight lows go down below 80, so a lot of the moisture condenses out of the air as dew. The record high in Bangkok is 104, and every state in the USA (except Alaska aand Hawaii) has a higher record than that. In New Jersey, the record is 110.
Sounds absolutely horrible!
New Orleans in the summer would be a miserable place to be without air conditioning. Even walking around the French Quarter wouldn’t be doable if it wasn’t for all the air-conditioned businesses you can step into whenever you want to.
Highs in the mid-90’s isn’t all that bad, unless you combine it with lows in the 80’s. Having lived in Texas most of my life, and in the southeastern US for nearly the rest of it, I have come to the belief that it isn’t the daily high temperatures that make it hot, it’s the nightly low temperatures. Hitting 105 during the day isn’t all that bad if it drops below 80 when the sun goes down and into the 60’s before it comes back. But, if it is 95 at 4PM, 90 at 9PM, and 80 at 6AM, that is HOT. You can’t cool off without AC.
In parts of southeast Texas, it does that pretty much everyday between Memorial Day and late September (don’t be fooled, Labor Day will give you some of the hottest weather of the year). Sure, you may get higher individual daily highs in the northern cities, and you may run into a week or so of nights that don’t cool off, but a week or so isn’t like 4-5 months.
To understand humidity, you have tounderstand Dew Point, That is the real indicator, and the TV weatherman pretty much ignores it, ,preferring the useless buzzword "humidity.
Dew point is the temperature at which the air is saturated with all the moisture it can hold. If the temp drops beliw the dew point, moisture condenses out and dew forms. The dew point can never be higher than the temperature, and when they are the same, the humidity is 100%.
The dew point remains relatively stable through the day, so if it starts out low in the morning, there is a good chance it will not be a very humid day.
Here in south Texas, its 9:30 am, and the temperature is already up to 88, with a dew point of 79, and a “feels like” quotation of 106. 79 is a very high dew point. By contrast, in Bangkok right now (It’s ten pm) the temp is 86, it feels like 93, and there is a lovely dewpoint of 72.
As a rule of thumb, in summer, I consider a dewpoint of 70 to be refreshingly cool, and 75 is in the uncomfortable range. Most days here it is in the 70-75 range. Yes, five degrees of dewpoint will make an enormous difference in how you feel. Here is this morning’s dew point map:
heh a few years ago I went to a wedding near new Orleans from CA’s high desert …I felt sticky and was miserable most of the time and has all sorts of physical problems due to it
when the relatives from there came here in the summer they were shockedp eople walked around here when it was 112 like no big deal …
