2024, Family, Food, home, Kids, Nature, Seasons, Uncategorized, Weather

Melting

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I received a text from Daughter on Tuesday in a panic because it was 93° in Tacoma, her apartment was hot except for her bedroom, where she has a portable air conditioner, and her refrigerator had stopped working and everything in her freezer/fridge was melted. She had to throw out eight grocery bags of food. Only the cheese was salvageable.

I immediately went into problem solving mode, inquiring about rental insurance, repairs, etc. This was not what she needed or wanted. She just wanted me to commiserate and console. It turned out to be a problem with the fridge shorting out the fuse panel in her apartment. She just needs to keep an eye on it.

Very few people in the Pacific North West have air conditioning because it rarely gets that hot there. There have been unusual but increasingly frequent heat waves there. I am a person who is always cold, so no matter how hot it is, it rarely bothers me. I could probably do ok there. I remember how excited my parents were when we got an air conditioner installed in the dining area of our house when I was in about Grade 1. It only kept the livingroom cool, but it sure made them feel good.

I have never had to deal with a freezer or fridge that went on the fritz. I often wonder what we would do if we had an extended period of electricity loss given all the freezers we have in the basement. I think I would gets lots of ice to keep everything cold and get a gas powered generator to fill in for the loss of power.

When did you first have air-conditioning? Ever had to deal with a freezer or fridge that malfunctioned? What kind of help do you want when you are upset?

32 thoughts on “Melting”

  2. Never had A/C when I was a kid. If we were “dying from the heat,” we went into the basement. No sympathy from Mom and Dad, who also grew up with no A/C.

    First A/C was a window job in an apartment we rented for a short time in 1984. First central air was in our house in Bloomington in 1987. Have been living in the A/C era ever since and appreciate it greatly because I HATE being hot.

    Chris in Owatonna

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    1. Forgot to respond to the other questions. Refrig or freezer issues have only been short term when the power goes out. Usually short outages other than once the power was off several hours and we got a bit nervous about the basement freezer foodstuffs.

      I want answers 99% of the time when I’m upset. Can’t remember when I last looked for a shoulder to cry on. Might be because I don’t get upset that much. There are no guarantees in life, and “Life is tough. Get used to it.” Happy people don’t dwell on the negative. They fix things the best they can, be grateful if they’re still alive and healthy and have food, clothing, and shelter, and move on.

      Chris in Owatonna

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  4. I grew up with natural ac. Then moved back to it. Never had ac when living in Chicago or Twin Cities. Always had central ac here in three places in Mankato. The fridge in this apartment went out ruining all the food. They told me to give them an estimate of the value of the food and they paid me. I was honest about it.

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  5. I grew up with central air in the St. Paul suburbs. Ever since I moved to Mpls I’ve only had window A/C units, and it’s wryly amusing to remember the temperatures at which we’d start the air conditioning back then. Of course, turning on the A/C was so much easier than hefting a window unit into a second-floor window! We try to tough it out with fans for as long as possible every year (that’s what we’ll be doing this weekend; the A/C will only go in if it looks like there’ll be a more than week-long stretch of high temps). Our landlady has a cot in the basement for heat waves, but I’d rather roast than try to sleep down there with the spiders and centipedes, ish da!

    –Crow Girl

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  6. From JacAnon–we are at the emergenct vet with Phoebe who woke up this a.m. doing poorly. Say your prayers for her…and us. She is so sick.

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        2. What a day. I am deeply grateful for AC today. Sometime during my high school years my parents acquired AC. Their house had direct west exposure on a picture window which operated as a passive solar collector so it got hot. When I am upset I want someone to listen and validate, then I get myself in hand and problem-solve.

          In 1998 our house was hit by a damaging hail and windstorm that took out the roof and the electricity for 5 days. The neighbors behind us who did have power allowed is to plug in an extension cord by which we operated the freezer and fridge, thank goodness. We also had a lamp and the tv on that cord. JacAnon

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  7. We didn’t have A/C during my elementary school years. The upstairs bedrooms were HOT during the summer so we would sleep on cots in the screened in porch. The folks put roller shades over the screens in half of the porch and hung a sheet from a clothesline in the middle of the porch so we had some privacy. Sometime in junior high we got a window unit and put it in the upstairs bedroom window opposite the stairway so some of the cool air made it to the main floor. I had window units in my apartments in the Cities. When I bought my condo, I had the A/C roughed in. I wanted to see if I really needed the A/C. The first two summers were among the hottest up to that time (early to mid 1980s). The next year I had the A/C hooked up and never looked back! I use it mainly to keep the humidity out of the air – don’t like to have it cold so the temp is kept at 78 to 80.
    No car A/C until early 80s. My 1974 Plymouth Duster had vinyl seats. I drove it to Oklahoma one summer when the temps were close to triple digits – nearly burned myself with the seatbelt buckle (and any other part that was metal). What a miserable trip that was! The next car had cloth seats and the car after that finally had A/C.

    Sending healing energy to Phoebe. Poor girl!

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  8. Fans and window AC units are all I’ve ever had in homes. Even now I’m sitting in my apartment with a window AC in the kitchen and a fan pushing the cooler air into the TV/Aviary. It’s 80 which works fine for me, and the Birds like that temperature.

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  9. Growing up we didn’t have AC. No one did in Denmark. It simply didn’t ever get hot enough that we needed it. The same is true for pretty much everywhere I lived until I arrived in Southern Illinois. Summers are hot and humid there, and we sweltered using window fans to blow the hot air around. We couldn’t afford AC, and neither could any of our fellow students.

    When I arrived in the Twin Cities in 1972, I was expecting cold winters, but the hot humid summers took me by surprise. But once again, AC was not within our budget for a long time.

    Our house was built in 1889, so no central air. We manage to keep it reasonably comfortable with three window air conditioners.

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    1. AC and I have a weird relationship. Growing up we never had AC until the house we moved to when I was in high school and that was not central but HUGE units in a few rooms. I had one in my room but it was so noisy that I never used it. This is St. Louis, mind you but I was very stubborn about it.

      My first house in Mpls had no AC and wasband #1 and I didn’t get a bedroom unit until we’d lived here several years.

      This house, YA and I each have a window unit for our bedrooms but I resist putting it in each summer. So far this summer, both of our units are still sitting in the closet.

      Some of this is that I love having the windows open during the summer, hearing the out of doors and getting the breeze. Having my AC on makes me feel a little claustrophobic. And I’m so darn stubborn.

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  10. Once when I was a kid, our power was off once for a couple of days. This meant that the big freezer in the basment was a problem. And since my folks were the “we know a guy – we can get a half a cow cheap” kind of folks, it was a fairly big problem. I remember driving coolers to each of my grandparents’ homes filled with white butcher paper wrapped hunks of meat. And there were a ton of meat dishes that week. I don’t think we actually lost much and the experience did not keep my folks from getting another half cow a couple of years later.

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  11. We are sitting here with no power as a storm is moving in and some electrical power transmission thing west of town must have been hit by lightning. We will hope we don’t need to buy a pickup load of ice to keep the things in the freezers ftom melting. They usually get the power back on quickly.

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  12. Well. The power is now on, the AC is working, and hail and wind and rain did not materialize. It got dark and green. I pray for our small communities to the south of us, as I am afraid that is where the storm went. It could storm here later tonight, though.

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  13. This is the first house I’ve lived in that’s had central air. We don’t use it until the climate control – pulling shades and closing windows – doesn’t work, and the indoor temp is 82. But then I am grateful to have it, esp. in extreme humidity like we’ll be having this weekend.

    OT – our internet was down again most of yesterday, and then Husband accidentally found a computer button called Reset – has taken me all day to put things back together, and I’ll need tech help from my computer guy. : |
    May be fodder for a blog post, though.

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  15. I was out of town many years ago when a big storm came through and knocked over a lot of trees. The power was out for two or three days, I think. My sister called me to let me know. I was in San Francisco, as I recall, for a conference.

    When I came back the power was back on and everything in the refrigerator and freezer seemed normally cold.

    I tasted the carton of milk, and it wasn’t sour, so I kept it and finished it. I don’t think I threw anything out – mostly the food I had was food you cook before eating, so I figured as long as it was heated to a pathogen-killing temperature, it would be fine.

    I just put the window unit in the dining room window today. Up till now the house has been quite comfortable, although I had the little bedroom unit running two or three times in the last few weeks. With the forecast calling for 90’s and humid this weekend, I figured it was time to call in the heavy artillery.

    It has been a really long stretch of comfortable temperatures here this spring and early summer.

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  16. Evening. Still no AC for us. All the rooms have ceiling fans, except the living room. Because we have electric heat in the ceilings, there is no ductwork, and no center light in the living room. (Mom and dad had one fluorescent light behind a valance, which we replaced with track lighting.)

    As a kid I slept in the basement. Usually one night per summer, when it’s been hot and humid for too long and I’m feeling grumpy, I go sleep downstairs.

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  17. It’s unusually hot here too! I wrote about it! And like you, I am a cool person in the heat so this is really on another level. Never heard of a fridge malfunctioning because of the heat…must have been bad

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