I'm not crazy about air conditioning. I try to wait as long as possible before turning it on every year. Even when it's on, we keep the thermostat up around 80 so it just takes the edge off the heat.
It's not because I'm cheap or anything. Well okay, I am cheap. But it's not just that. There are a lot of things I don't like about air conditioning:
-Because refrigerated air is so dry, I often feel cold when it's running, even if the thermostat is still pretty high. It makes sense to use climate control to make myself comfortable, but making myself uncomfortably cold just feels ridiculous and wasteful.
-Also my hands and face dry out something awful if I spend too much time in air conditioning. I already get dry and chapped in winter; I don't need it to happen in summer too.
-It makes hot weather seem even hotter. When I'm acclimatized to refrigerated air, a day that would have been just a little warm now seems unbearably hot.
-I feel really disconnected. When the house is all shut up I can't hear the birds, I can't feel the breeze. When it starts to cool down in the evening, instead of enjoying it, I don't even know because I'm sealed up in my climate controlled environment.
All that said, every summer I eventually break down and turn on the air conditioning. This year it happened yesterday. At some point in late afternoon I realized that it was too hot to concentrate on work, so I shut up the house and put on the a/c. We turned it off again at night when it cooled down outside.
That's what we try to do all summer: run the a/c only on the hottest days, and then only during the hottest part of the day. We have one of those whole house fans that does a good job of cooling the house most of the time, just by keeping air moving. I have to say, if I ever moved into a house without a whole house fan, the first thing I'd do is install one.
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