I know, those of you who live in actual hot places will NOT be impressed with this forecast, but for New England, this is kind of Peak Summer (later in the week anyway).
Highs in the mid-to-high 80's and increasing humidity with lows only getting into the 60's around sunrise. In June this means it’s still 80 when we’re trying to go to bed, and because our bedroom is the whole south side of our 2nd floor, it gets ALL the sun in the afternoon. If it’s 80 and sunny, it’s easily 90 in our room, even with the windows open. My wife and I both like it cool to sleep, not to mention quiet.
We’ve been in this house 11 years now and every year it seems we’ve used our window-unit A/C’s more and more, and I’ve slept worse every night we’ve had to run them because of the cycling on and off noise... until finally we put in a mini-split last week:
Of course it’s barely cracked 70 since Friday, but we ran it a little just to see what it could do, and it’s glorious. We had a 5,000 and 6,000 BTU window unit in the room and that was adequate. This unit is 15,000. We expect we’ll do what we’ve done in the past and just leave the door open to let the cool/drier air go out into the hall and downstairs (we’ve never run an a/c in the downstairs, haven’t needed to). At a minimum our bedroom will be very comfortable and QUIET overnight, and I expect the house will be plenty comfortable just letting this run all afternoon with the bedroom door open.
The kids’ rooms still have window units, we’ll probably just run them on the very hottest days, for an hour or so before they go to bed to cool the rooms down. We’ll see.
Aside from the obvious a/c benefit, this unit can heat as well, and since the whole upstairs zone for our forced hot water system runs almost entirely to heat our room, this might be a more efficient method of heating up our room for a couple hours in the morning and evening as we do in the winter. In any case, it’s not a bad thing to have another heating/cooling option, and one that’s very efficient and powerful, too.
BRING ON THE HEAT!