Whole-House Fan Fan - Repost

Our air conditioner is going strong.

*sound of me knocking on every piece of wood in a six-block radius*

It has been running continuously for four weeks straight – and I mean the 24/7 kind of continuously – minus a four-day period when we were able to turn it off to go out of town. I’m not going to lie – I was a little afraid to hit the off switch. I thought about just leaving it on and eating an insanely unnecessary electric bill for fear of upsetting any delicate balance that may be going on inside the old unit.

By the grace of God it came back on and we remain cool here inside our house that seems to be located on the surface of the sun at the moment. In order to appreciate how blessed we are right now, I decided to re-read what I wrote about almost exactly ten years ago, when we weren’t so fortuitous.

I thought you might want to read it too, so here it is. And if you happen to be currently going through the same thing we were ten years ago, I sincerely hope that you

a) have a whole-house fan, and

b) don’t get murdered by your significant other.

Stay cool, and enjoy.

 

August 6, 2014

Two weeks ago I wrote about how I failed to fix our broken air conditioner, but on the plus side, managed NOT to barbeque myself with giant exposed electrical cables while doing some amateur and ill-advised work in our electrical panel. All good news aside, I am sad to report that our air conditioner is still broken.

I’m not going to lie to you. It has been rough here. Tensions are high. Nerves are frayed. Wits are at their end.

It is hot inside our house.

We have been without A/C for almost three weeks now, and unfortunately for us, those three weeks have been some of the hottest on record here in Northern California. Other places might have been hot as well, but I don’t know, and frankly, I don’t care. I am afraid to turn on the TV for fear that it will either heat up the house even more or explode.

All I can tell you is our family would not do well in an equatorial country. Last Friday it was 109 degrees outside. Through the miracle of sagging and worn R40 insulation, it was only 94 degrees in our bedroom when we went to bed. Actually, I should say when I went to bed. My wife was sleeping downstairs where it was only 89 degrees. On Saturday morning she threatened to leave me and the kids and go stay at a friend’s house. She had a crazy look in her eyes. “You guys can’t come. There’s only room for me.”

I guess information, whether good or bad, is always handy to have. I now know that our cohesive family bond snaps like a dry twig around day four or five above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and we move into an every-man-for-himself scenario. Live and learn.

There are only two things keeping us from going to a full-scale Lord of the Flies situation at this point: Cold showers and our whole-house fan.

The whole-house fan is really the eighth wonder of the modern world. There are two main types of whole-house fans to choose from. The first is the ducted variety. These have a fan or fans mounted inside your attic, with ductwork that draws the air from the interior of the home. They are very quiet. We do not have that kind.

The second kind is the ceiling-mounted variety. These are basically a slightly smaller version of a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter mounted to the ceiling of your hallway. These are incredibly loud. This is the kind we have.

Deafening prop wash noise aside, all whole-house fans work in the same manner. “The fan creates a ‘positive pressure’ in the attic and a ‘negative pressure’ inside the house, consequently drawing the cooler outside air in through open windows.”

I have not been up in the attic to experience what “positive pressure” feels like, but in the case of our home at least, “negative pressure” can be described better as “a howling 40-knot gale.” Our fan has two speed settings, and if you turn it on high, you have to make sure the children are tethered down.

The loudness and ferocity of the unit might be attributable to its size. We have the biggest model available in the free world. We were smart when we bought it a few years ago, shopping for it in the whole-house fan off-season. Because we purchased it in November we saved at least seven dollars, and were able to parlay that savings into an upgrade. The salesman sold us on the big one, presumably to best fit the size of our house, or possibly because the conversation went something like this:

Me: “Ooh, I want the big one!”

Salesman: “OK. Sign here quick.”

The key point in the operational description of the fan is really the term “cooler outside air.” This is critical, and in the case of our current three-week-long survival experiment, “cooler outside air” didn’t usually manifest itself until around midnight. This put us into a strange schedule of going to bed around one A.M. and sleeping until nine o’clock in the morning. By the time we get moving in the sluggish torpor of our deliciously cool 84-degree house, we are eating breakfast around eleven A.M. and having lunch at four o’clock. Basically, we’re now Italian.

Still, we can’t blame the whole-house fan for the lack of cool outside air. It can only do what it can do with the air it’s provided. On the plus side, even if it is not cooling us off as much as we might want, it is still cooling us down. Also, it provides a nice white noise while we sleep. It’s a lot like sleeping up inside the mechanical housing on an industrial wind turbine.

I love our whole-house fan. Not only for its economical cooling during normal summer weather, but for the safety it has provided us recently. I can say without hesitation that we would be dead without it. It is impossible to say whether we would have perished from heat stroke or from the wrath of mom, but one of them was definitely going to happen.

Thankfully, there was a break in the weather the other day and my wife decided begrudgingly to stay at home with us, and refrain from killing anyone. The A/C is scheduled to be actually fixed today, so our fingers are all crossed. It might just be the heat, but after three weeks of disappointment, I remain skeptical.

One thing is for sure, when the A/C actually does get fixed, we are going to have to ease ourselves back into the cooler temperatures. At this point 85 degrees inside the house actually feels comfortable. We went out to dinner the other night and our teeth were chattering inside the restaurant. I took the boys to the grocery store yesterday and they almost went hypothermic in the refrigerated aisle.

Still, having A/C back is going to be safer for everyone. My wife informs me that there is another heat wave coming, and she looks ready to snap any minute.

If you don’t hear from me next week, send someone to check on us.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

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I Love Lucy - Part II

Just before a section of the trail down into the Grand Canyon called Jacob’s Ladder, Simon, our lead wrangler, stopped the mule train and said a Navajo prayer. I don’t speak Navajo, so I said my own prayer instead.

Lord, please don’t let any of us die by:

a) falling off a cliff

b) being kicked or stepped on by one of these enormous mules

c) bursting into flames

d) some other way

Amen.

The Navajo prayer sounded more poetic, but mine was to the point. Either way, the top of Jacob’s Ladder was a good place to pray. The bible story says that Jacob’s Ladder was a stairway to Heaven, but the name is deceiving. The one in the Grand Canyon is a slippery rock path straight to hell.

On that Monday last week it was over a hundred degrees by eight in the morning. At the TOP of the canyon. It only got hotter as we went down. It was one hundred and twenty degrees in the shade at the bottom. My mother-in-law lives in Morro Bay, California, an idyllic little beach community where it never gets above seventy-two degrees. For the whole ride, sitting atop her mule Sassy, she looked like she’d just drank an entire bottle of Tabasco sauce. The wranglers kept pouring ice water on her head and down her back whenever we stopped, presumably in an attempt to stave off spontaneous combustion.

Prior to the ride, Scott, the lead wrangler with the most kick-ass western mustache you ever saw, attempted to scare us into not going. He listed every conceivable way we could die in the Grand Canyon, which took him a half hour since it’s such a long list. Since I was planning on taking pictures with my cell phone, he told me to put it into airplane mode. Apparently a ringing phone can spook the mules. And if your mule gets spooked on a skinny trail carved into the side of a cliff, there’s a good chance you’ll be flying, so either way, airplane mode is a good idea.

Down we went into the furnace. Literally, we rode down into a place called The Devil’s Furnace. It was so hot, the devil himself would have probably said, “No thanks. I’ll stay here in the hotel.” That was just after we all somehow avoided plunging thousands of feet to our deaths off of a section of trail – and I’m using the term ‘trail’ loosely, just like how its rocks were attached – called The Devil’s Backbone. I’m guessing most of the places in the Grand Canyon were named in July by someone with no water.

Each time we stopped, after forcing water into us in an increasingly desperate attempt to keep at least most of us alive, Simon would tell us about what we were seeing. This is where so-in-so died. Here’s where they found more human bones. These rocks are only about a billion years old. The rocks kept getting older and older as we descended. Based on some very rough math, taking into account that we were breathing trail dust from many different sections of the ride, differing by thousands of feet in elevation, I calculated that my boogers were at a minimum, eighty-five million years old. I have kept them to sell to a museum.  

When we stopped for lunch my son asked Simon what his Navajo name was. He said something unpronounceable, and when we asked him what it meant, he said, “Walks into trouble.”

Hmm... Halfway down the canyon isn’t the best place to learn that. Maybe if Scott had mentioned that little tidbit, some of us would have backed out. All of a sudden following you doesn’t seem like the best idea. On the other hand, all of us will surely die right here in this spot if you leave us... OK, we’ll stay with you.

Back up on Lucy – which was no small feat because neither of my legs were working at that point – it occurred to me that while we were drinking nine gallons of water a minute to stay alive, the mules hadn’t had a drop of water all day. It was right then and there that I understood why they use mules for this ride.

They say they use them instead of horses because of the mule’s sense of self-preservation. They won’t do dumb things like a horse will if they get spooked. I really appreciated that about Lucy, especially when looking down the side of her neck at drop-offs that made me really wish I was wearing a parachute. But up until halfway through the ride down I hadn’t appreciated how tough they are. No wonder the Army loves them. Mules are the toughest animals on the planet. They make the honey badger look like a pillow pet.

Down to the bottom of “The Big Ditch” we went. Just in case all the cliffs on the way down weren’t exciting enough, the ride ended with a leisurely mule stroll across a four hundred fifty-foot-long suspension bridge, about a Lucy and a half wide, hanging in the air seventy feet above the deepest part of the Colorado River. I’m almost positive my mother-in-law had her eyes closed. Back on solid ground we rode into a place called Phantom Ranch.

Throughout the day we had occasionally caught a glimpse of a single power line, making its way from the top of the canyon down to some unknown destination at the bottom. Mercifully, Phantom Ranch turned out to be its termination point, and it was powering an A/C unit in our cabin, along with at least one refrigerator that was doing the most important thing it could ever do – keeping beer and wine cold. There is a God after all amidst all this hell.

The manager of Phantom Ranch told us that only one percent of the people who visit the Grand Canyon actually make it down to the bottom. I asked, but she didn’t have a figure for how many of the ninety-nine percent didn’t make it because they burst into flames.

Being in the elite one percent group made the beer taste even better. She never did tell us what percentage actually make it back up to the top, but luckily for us, Lucy and her mule buddies have a one hundred percent success rate.

Thanks for the ride, girl!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2016 Marc Schmatjen

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Back to School

When I was a kid, we didn’t go back to school until after Labor Day. Nowadays here in California, our kids return in August. My boys went back yesterday. I was always opposed to starting school before Labor Day, but only on the grounds of it being different than my childhood. I am just now beginning to understand the thinking behind moving it up.

I have been holding down my post here as the new Mr. Mom since mid-July, and as such, I have been forced to be within a few feet of all three of our boys for every single minute of every waking hour of every single week and weekend day for a whole lot of days in a row. I have to tell you, I might not be cut out for this.

I used to get to leave. Sure, when I did I had to go to an office and work, but still, I got to leave. I never realized how much they fight with each other. It’s not the fighting that I mind so much, it’s the whining about it that annoys me.

(Son in whiny, sniffle-ly voice) “He punched me in the stomach!”

(Other son in whiny defensive voice) “He wouldn’t get off my face!”

(Me in annoyed voice) “You were wrestling with each other for five minutes. What did you think would happen?!? Go read a book. You hardly ever get punched when you’re doing that.”

(Two ultra-whiny voices in stereo) “I don’t want to read!”

(Me in even more annoyed voice) “Then why don’t you move to North Korea.”

“What?”

grumble, grumble

“Can we watch TV instead?”

“No. I want you to be sharper, not duller.”

“Huh?”

“GO FIND A BOOK!!”

I don’t know when they start school in the far northern and far southern regions of California, where the weather is mild in the summer, and frankly I don’t care. Here in the Sacramento region it gets hotter than the hinges of hell in July and August. I would gladly take them outside for an enjoyable activity where we could bond and grow stronger and happier as father and sons, but it’s like the surface of the sun out there. It was 106 degrees a few days ago. That’s just stupid.

The other day, when I simply couldn’t stand being inside the same building as my three sons for another moment, I broke down and took them on a bike ride. Since it was 104 degrees, the plan was to ride to the water park, run around in the refreshing spray for a while, then ride back in our wet clothes, feeling nice and cool. No such luck. We arrived, sweaty and partially cooked, to a dry water park. A little red girl in a swimsuit with heat waves coming off her shoulders informed us that the plumbing was broken.

They should send out a warning signal or something. Son Number Three nearly exploded from the heat on the way back. He’s much blonder than the other two. Son Number One and Two used up all the available swarthy DNA my wife and I had to offer, and all that was left for Number Three was the blond-haired, blue-eyed, translucent-skinned Nordic genes. We usually just hold him upside down by his ankles and dip him into a 55-gallon drum of sunscreen before we leave the house.

Number One’s tire went flat halfway home. I briefly considered leaving him and saving the other two. My wife would understand that there was nothing I could do, right? After reconsidering, we stuck together and walked our bikes back, just making it to our door as our shoes began to melt. Son Number Three had stopped sweating, which is a bad sign, so we all took emergency cold baths and showers while drinking ice water. Close call.

So, what did the boys want to do after we had all cooled off and returned to the proper color? They wanted to set up a lemonade stand. Are you kidding me? We just narrowly escaped that furnace, and you want to go back? Look out at our street, son. Look through those heat waves coming off the asphalt and tell me what you see. You know what you see? Nothing. Nobody. Nada. Everyone is indoors. If I let you sit out there trying to sell lemonade, you will die long before the first customer happens by in their air-conditioned vehicle. And if by chance someone is dumb enough to be outside right now, do you know what they don’t want? They don’t want to buy a shot glass-sized Dixie cup of hot lemonade from a red, flaming kid with heat stroke. Go find a book.

Not only is summer too hot, it is also too long. I’m fine with school getting out at the beginning of June, but we don’t need ten weeks to “rest.” Now that I am Mr. Mom, I fully support an early start, and suggest that next year we have a nice four-week break and send them back right after the Fourth of July.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2013 Marc Schmatjen

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