Jul 19, 2024 4 min read

Every week or so, the email arrives from my electric company.

Your energy use last week was…

Lately I’ve been afraid to open the email to see what the rest of it says. And when I do, it’s bad news, a harbinger of a hateful bill that’s about to arrive in the mail. And so my goal has been to stop the kilowatts from cranking and save myself from the sort of electric bill that looks like a mortgage payment from the 1990s.

First, keep the air conditioning at a minimum. During the 95-degree days last week, each time I walked past the thermostat, I wanted so badly to hit that button and tell it to make it 65 in here. But who could afford that? And so it stayed at 73.

That’s a temperature that feels comfortable, but truly cool only when I step back inside after walking the dog through the slog of 95 and humid. And for those first few minutes I think ahhhhh, AC!

At night, I set the temperature at 75, thinking those few extra degrees will shave my bill a bit. To supplement, there’s a large stand fan in the bedroom that’s so windy it blows the pages of my book around. I don’t know the equation that would tell me if a strong fan uses less energy than an air conditioner, but I like sleeping with the noise. (It’s the same thermodynamics question I’ve had about cycling through the heat: Does the breeze I create while pedaling fast compensate for the body heat that the physical exertion generates? Not sure, but I think the equation is body heat + sweat – H2O x 13 mph = misery.)

We all remember life before air conditioning. I grew up in a Cape Cod house where we all slept in two bedrooms on the second floor. On the hottest summer nights, we kids would be in one room and my parents in the other, and in the hall between us was a single box fan – a shared bit of cool breeze to supplement the open windows. The hum of the fan was not strong enough to drown the sound of the crickets outside.

Those of us with air conditioning are lucky. In even hotter places, people are suffering in the heat, and some are dying. I think about the daytime “cooling centers” that open during the hottest days, and wonder what it would be like to spend the day in comfort, only to return home to try to sleep in a sweltering home.

My work hasn’t taken me outside much during the hot spell, but I have helped my co-workers load and carry camera equipment out of cars and into buildings. It’s like walking through quicksand, and it’s exhausting. I think about those who are working on rooftops, or on hot pavement.

You don’t need to crack an egg on a sidewalk to know how hot it is. Walking Smoothie the Sheltie has been a challenge. I carry him from the house to the yard, and then try to keep him on the grassy spots as we walk the block to the park; even that surface is uncomfortable with its brown, crunchy grass.

I finally went back and opened the email from the electric company. During the hottest week, I used 38% more electricity than the previous week. Remembering my past electric bill, I tried to calculate what that extra bit of cool comfort would cost me. Plenty, of course.

The bill will arrive in the mail next week. I’ll open it, roll my eyes with disgust, and then remind myself things could be worse – 20 degrees of misery worse.