Nice weather we have here, or I thought I'd die

[Cheb]

One (of the many) reasons all my fics are stalled is this thrice accursed weather.
I thought June was bad.
Then came July and things got worse, with daily temperatures ranging from 30-35C (86-95F), stabilizing at 35-36C towards the end of the month. I gave up and bought a mobile air conditioner -- as the companies installing split systems have their hands full, the nearest date you could order an air conditioner installed was well into autumn. Well, a mobile one was delivered the next day... Then I switched it on, cussed and spent two hours disassembling it and then assembling it back, just so that I could tighten the all-important screw left loose by the crook-handed Chinese workers (I was so starved for cool by then that I could care less about the warranty).

Now, a mobile air conditioner, has both strong and weak sides compared to a stationary ones (the biggest plus is being there right now, not some months later). The second feature, it blows part of the ingested air out to the street, through a flexible trunk. You don't have to be a genius to see what this means: the displaced air is replaced by the fresh hot one coming from the outside.
This is both a minus (as it makes the thing terribly power-ineffective) and a plus (as the air in your room never gets stale as with the split systems).

As the road to work and back became a daily exercise in fortitude (I once experienced a one sweatdrop from the tip of my nose per five seconds ratio, which endangered my netbook I type my fics on -- or read from -- while in the subway) I could care less for the electric bill, so I thought I got the best of the air conditioner world (cool air that is never stale), but then...

Yesterday I looked in the window and saw this:

Yes, it's smoke. A noxious, foul smelling smoke.
To top it off, the temperature was rapidly climbing to 35C/95F.

Guess what my air conditioner did? It supplied me with a fresh, cool smoke
What a harrowing dilemma I had there! Shut it off, seal all windows and suffer the heat. Or leave it working... and breathe the noxious fumes. Oh, the suffering!

My ingenuity saved me -- albeit barely -- with this contraption made of a turbofan, a cardboard box and a wet bedsheet:


These were exhausting two days, but as of today evening the smoke shroud slowly lifted... Ah, I'm so glad to be able to breathe again, without a wet cloth over my face! It's back to the usual drought, with the trees slowly wilting and the lawns long ago turned to ash sprinkled with hay. It'll soon be two frigging months with only _one_ short rainstorm during that time!

Well, how about you? Anyone else has any horror stories about their local weather?

[Spokavriel]

I have a little Swamp cooler sitting in the hall that goes down the center of my apartment its designed to cool a space that is 3 meters cube but placing it there it helps the whole apartment some. Biggest problem with swamp coolers is if you don't keep a window open to avoid moisture building up too much it will cancel its own effect.

But that does bring up a question. When you had the Smoke problem why didn't you just bring the air inlet indoors and let it recycle your indoor less polluted air?

[Cheb]

Ah, there's no inlet per se. The big box on wheels sucks the air in from the room with its entire backside. That air then is split in two: half is cooled and blown out from the front, back into the room. The second half is heated and blown outside via the trunk, taking both the heat absorbed from the air it cools and the heat generated by the machine itself.

Plus, there was a window plug with a special attachment for the trunk, the problem is, it's for sliding windows you slide up (or aside) to open. As there are no such windows (I never saw one in my lifetime) that plug is useless. All I could do is open my window ajar and put the trunk through the resulting (wide) crack. Enough to say, the law of conservation makes the street air to come in replacing the amount of air the conditioner blows out (with the working plug it would be air from deeper in the apartment).

P.S. Today I had to manually evict a moronic pigeon who walked in through the said crack then panicked and started thrashing on my potted plants trying to flee through the glass

P.P.S Any resident of Beijing would laugh at my trouble while I shudder just thinking of their usual weather (+40C at 80% humidity).

[Spokavriel]

That is painfully lethal humidity. They really need to clean their air more to cut that down. Even Korea doesn't get hit with that combo as often.

I had the same situation you had with the Pigeon happen a few times once with a finch and another time with small a bat. The bat was my favorite I wish I had a way to have kept it as a pet.

[mondu_the_fat]

Temperatures here reached 38C last month. On a personal level it wasn't so bad -- I just moved my sessions at my clinic to noon so that I could bask in their aircon. On off days I take a quick bath 3 to 5 times a day. Its significantly cooler these days.

My computer used to have a temp monitor that would ring an alarm and pop up a warning, but I had to turn it off because otherwise I couldn't use the computer, and even then I'd only use it for an hour. Either that or just use the computer at night. Good thing I got a PSP, because otherwise I'd be bored to tears in the daylight hours.

Then after the summer there was a massive storm that knocked out power for 2 days for most of region. No more A/C (not even the malls), but at least the rain was cool. Ended up slipping in the dark on a wet patch on the floor in front of the fridge and had to be x-rayed for fractures, but otherwise no problem.

The bat was my favorite I wish I had a way to have kept it as a pet.

Heh. Reminds me of my mom. There's a mango tree right outside my room. One night:

"That's a big bird. What's it doing out at night, though?"
"That's not a bird."

(Cue screaming).

Damn pigeons are using my A/C as a nest. Noisy buggers, scares off all the other songbirds (I prefer the chirping/singing rather than the cooing), and the top of my A/C is full of bird crap.

[Spokavriel]

The bat I was dealing with was tiny. It might have even been a vampire bat. It was only about 3 inches tall with a 9 inch wingspan and its fur was a rich chocolate color.

[Quickshot0]

Ehh, Europe can't really compare to such horror stories of heat. I guess an advantage of the high latitude, though that just means we're poorly prepared for heatwaves in general.

[Undeen]

Eh, we've been averaging between 38-44C as our highs for the last month at least, not seeing record for earlier than July, but that's fairly common for summer here. Thankfully our humidity is normally fairly low, especially as my room has no AC.

[DCG]

Wow.. well i glad things sorta worked out for you. Now impressive story's here.

Im just hiding in my AC, half for health reasons, half since its 100 something out.

With self contained central air here.. about the only thing i had to do was clean and adjust the hydmifier.

And its a good thing i did.. as soon as i got it working it pulled so much water out of the air my subpump system kicked on. (drains to sub system)

Now as a comparasion for water level's needed to turn that system on. It normally takes the street's around here to be flooded with 3 feet of water to get a reaction.

[Spokavriel]

And you survive that level of humidity without drowning how?