Here in the middle of the desert -- Midland, Texas -- it gets hot in the summer. Although, lately the mid afternoon temps have been a bit lower than the 106°F temps we saw last month, the mid 90s can still heat up a house to unlivable conditions without an air conditioner.
Now, it's true that there was a time when no house had air conditioning. And part of the reason for the migration of people from the North to the South is the prevalence of air conditioning. But there's a price to pay. Electricity isn't cheap.
So leads like this one don't exactly drop our jaws: Air conditioning and other appliances increase residential electricity use in the summer. Although, that same outfit tells us in How is electricity used in U.S. homes that only 18% of our electricity usage is for air conditioning, that's probably for the full year. During the summer it has to be much higher.
But those days when houses didn't have air conditioning are long gone, and I shudder to think about life in the South should the electric grid go out. There are still people around who grew up in Texas in a house without an air conditioner. (I'm one of them.) But few would want to go back to that.
But the silver lining to a dead grid is that the electricity bill would be zero. In fact, the system that actually gets the bill delivered will have probably collapsed, too. So we've got that going for us.
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2:13 PM 8/23/2017
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