Magic Heat

Somebody once told me that Texans are worse at enduring heat than the rest of the country, and I would believe it. It is true that southern Texas in the summer has been described as brutal, unbearable, and the next closest thing to sharing underpants with the devil (I might have made that last one up). Texans put up with the aforementioned heat eight months of the year (The Seasons in Texas: Almost Summer, Summer, Still Summer, and Hunting Season), shouldn’t that make them better at tolerating the extreme temperatures? No. Enter Air Conditioning.

Thanks to air conditioning the most a person in Texas (and rest of the country, I suppose) has to spend in that heat is the amount of time it takes to walk from their air conditioned house to their air conditioned car to the air conditioned work/restaurant/movie theatre/school/church back to their air conditioned car and back to their air conditioned house again. On any given day that is maybe 20 minutes in the full heat (some people can even start their car by remote and let it cool off before they leave the office). This was the day to day life that Sarah and I were accustomed to before we moved to San Diego.

When we moved into our apartment, it was the hottest day of the hottest week of the whole summer: 85 degrees – which in Texas would have been a cold snap. As we soon learned, air conditioning is not essential when you live this close to the coast. Instead of sealing off every possible heat leak in a house and pumping in cool, dry air, people just open the window when it is hot inside. We do have a small AC unit in the main room that we have used maybe a half dozen times since we moved in, but otherwise there is no ducting or air distribution devices in our apartment at all. Which raises the question, if there is no central air and no furnace, why are there two wall-mounted thermostats?

Placebo Thermostat and Butterfly

It is now one week until it is officially winter in San Diego. The typical over-night low is 48 degrees, which is nowhere near as cold as Minneapolis, MN where the typical over-night low is six degrees, but as Sarah and I found out 48 degrees does make it hard to get out from under the covers in the morning. To counter act the cooler weather, Sarah has taken to adjusting the thermostats, which I might remind you are not connected to anything (it is like herbal remedies, if you believe hard enough, they might just work).

The other day I got up for class and it was 42 degrees outside the apartment, but inside the apartment it was damn near 80 and very uncomfortable. I checked the thermostat and sure enough the needle was set to the upper extreme of what is labeled the “Comfort Zone.”

The "Comfort Zone"

I like to think I know more than the average person about heating and air conditioning, since I worked in HVAC for almost two years, but I still don’t know how these heaters work. Sarah say that they are magic, and I am inclined to believe her.