My wife Trudee wrote the following article.
As some of you already know, Chris and I live in Minnesota. What some may not know is that it gets pretty warm here in the summer. At the time of this writing, it’s 94 degrees with 37% humidity. I’m very grateful for the low humidity level, as our central air stopped working properly on Thursday! Unfortunately, I don’t tolerate ANY heat very well.
Chris and I decided to purchase a portable air conditioning unit this past spring, to keep our room cooler while we sleep. Little did we know at the time that the AC unit would end up being one of our best preps yet! (Okay, that’s MY opinion! hehehe)
We’ve talked about what we would do to keep the house warm in the winter if our furnace wasn’t working for whatever reason. We never gave much thought to what we would do if our central air stopped. Thursday night, we found out!
It was just after supper and I had just finished cleaning up the kitchen. I hadn’t had the oven on and couldn’t believe how warm it was in the house. The thermostat read 81 degrees and the outside AC unit sounded like it was running normally. I checked a few of the air vents to see if there was normal air flow. The crankiness started upon realizing there wasn’t much air movement at all.
Ladies, I don’t know how many of you have experienced hot flashes but that’s where I’m at in life right now and I don’t like being hot on a NORMAL day. I’m sweating from being in the kitchen, discovering that the AC isn’t working properly and having a hot flash on top of it all. This is one of those times when I have to be so grateful for God’s beautiful grace because I have NONE.
We’ve had a service plan through our natural gas supplier for years and years. We’ve had to use it enough that it has been worth the $17.95 per month and then some! We consider that plan a prep. It covers our furnace, gas drier, water heater and stove. We added our AC unit to it a few years back, thankfully.
I tried to schedule a service appointment online but the soonest was 5 days out and the next day was supposed to be 92 degrees! They’re usually so much faster than that but I’m guessing budget cuts have dwindled their service technician staff. I tried calling, hoping they would have something different. No such luck! I set the appointment up for 5 days out and set about the task of trying to get the house cooled off.
Chris and I share a home office. It’s on the top level of our small 4-level-split entry home. That top level is ALWAYS the warmest. Hot air rises and all that! (You can’t see it but I snarled when I said that.) Our bedroom is at the end of the short hallway that our home office shares. I decided that since we spend the most time in those rooms, I would do what I could to cool only those rooms.
I knew I had a spare shower curtain tension rod and I had just seen some black landscaping plastic in the garage. Remember now, we’re both unemployed and practicing making do with what we have. We have duct tape! hehehe I set the tension rod up to fit between the walls of the hallway and duct taped the black landscaping fabric to the tension rod. It proved to be a good makeshift barrier to keep the cooler air in our bedroom and office.
The portable AC unit is set up to vent out our bedroom window. Leaving our bedroom door open with a fan blowing the cooler air into the office helped Chris be able to work on the blog and me to be able to study. Once we were done for the day, we closed our bedroom door to keep it nice and cool for bedtime.
I’ve had to spend today in the bedroom as well. I’m thankful we have the option and I’m thankful for being a prepper. I knew what we would do to keep a room warm and similar principles are used to keep cool!
Thank you, Chris, for taking such good care of me while I hid from the heat!!
Chris says: We made it through the last five days or so and the AC is now fixed. Living in Minnesota, I have given a lot of thought to what we would do if we lost heat for an extended period. I’ve thought about how to keep cool in a general sense but never came up with a plan. Trudee knocked this out of the park, hanging that black plastic up kept the two rooms cool enough for me to work in the office.
To me, the two biggest assets a prepper can have are: thinking ahead and making do with what you have. We can’t think of everything but we can figure out how to get by!
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