Today I’m going to blog about being hot.
Oh, and no, not the hot as in “If you look at my pictures from last Bike To Work Day, you will realize that I’ve lost fat all over my body and now my belly is small enough that it doesn’t roll down the top of my bike shorts” sort of hot. Although that is nice too.
No, I’m talking about how it’s above 90 out here in Wirehead City, and. Unseasonably so. Even up in the mountains, it’s freaking hot. See, unlike the midwest, we’ve got a fairly moderate climate. Much more moderate than you’d assume for a place in sunny California. So normally, it’s not especially humid nor is it too hot or too cold. The only downside as far as my wife is concerned is that she likes a little bit of summer thunderstorms to break up the monotony of nice sunny day after nice sunny day.
But, every so often, it will get really kind of hot out here. Usually this isn’t so much mid-summer as it is either spring or fall. This also tends to mean that it’s better to look at places to live those times of the year, just to make sure that the place has enough air conditioning.
So, we knew we’d need air conditioning upstairs, but the place came with air conditioning upstairs. Given that the downstairs is nicely shaded and just transports hot air upstairs, an AC downstairs isn’t actually necessary. So there’s a through-wall unit in the bedroom.
I’m pretty sure that whoever they hired to do the electrical circuits whenever they added the air conditioning to the building was a shyster. See, they added a set of plugs closer to where the through-wall unit is when they cut the hole in the wall. Except that they put a through-wall unit that specifically tells you, in Spanish and English, that you must plug it into an outlet with a dedicated circuit. And it turns out that this is not actually the way it’s been wired. The entire upstairs is on a single 15 amp circuit.
Which, I might add, is a bit of a problem, because if the circuit breaker trips, it’s going to take down the router, the firewall, my Linux box, and my desktop. And, since I’m cheap, I haven’t gotten around to buying extra UPS’s to give the various other bits of networking hardware a proper battery backup. I’m pretty sure, based on my measurements as aided by the front panel on my UPS, that the biggest power draw is my 21” CRT, which means that if I’m upstairs and geeking out, the 21” CRT is on and I’d like to be running the air conditioning.
Now, the NEC seems to state that the exhortations on the side of the air conditioner that it must be on a single outlet circuit are not to be ignored. And probably in the sort of a way that cannot just be grandfathered in. Thus, unless the quick Google Book Search I did is wrong, my apartment is officially not to code.
Herein lies the problem. See, there are two ways to bring it back to code. They can remove the air conditioner or they can see about adding another circuit or otherwise properly fix things. I really don’t want to lose the air conditioner, but I can also be quite abrasive when I want to be.
Anyway, either way, it’s not going to be fixed today. Which, as a result, leaves me sitting in a puddle of my own sweat, wearing little more than a pair of shorts, listening to the fans on my computer that normally are fairly quiet spool up, cursing the air conditioner.
The main consolation, of course, is that I’m in a nice reasonably dry climate where sweat actually works.