I live in Colorado, the Denver area. People around here tend to rate how hot summers are based on how many days get over 90°F, so it doesn’t get very hot here. Before the POTS, I thought this heat was absolutely nothing. My car doesn’t have A/C (and hasn’t since before I got my license), and the apartment I lived in with Dan was my only residence in CO with A/C (the house before that had a swamp cooler, but it didn’t work too terribly well). So yeah, my house doesn’t have A/C.

I also want to replace the blinds with blackout curtains

My house, a townhouse, is oriented north to south (front door north, back is south). Well, the north side stays cool, well, cooler. But the south side gets HOT. We have a window in the kitchen, one in the powder room, one in the office, technically two in the master but they are connected to form one giant window, two venting skylights in the master bedroom, and a sliding glass door. The powder room and kitchen windows face north, and are only about 32 inch squares… and only half of it opens to incredibly broken screens. The office faces north as well, but the window is significantly larger, with the opening about the size of the downstairs windows 😛

(satellite dish from previous renters)

All of the other windows face south… yes, that’s all of the largest windows. The double window in our bedroom is as wide as our queen bed, the skylights are about 4 feet by 2 feet, the sliding glass door is standard height and six feet long. There are two reasons this layout is completely miserable.

1. There is not a tree behind our house, so we get full sun until the sun gets way over to the west.
2. Our windows are absolutely horrendous.

The skylights are new, but all of the others are original to the house… which makes them 30 years old this year. Even without the fancy glass technology, they would still be passably efficient with functional seals… notice that was not in present tense? Yeah, my windows also have completely shot seals, and not in ways that are easy to fix. In the winter, there is literally a cool breeze in a few spots across the floor… thank goodness for slippers! Unfortunately, we have the opposite problem in summer. All the cool air runs out of the closed windows… which is a bummer.

Buuuuuuutttttttttttttt… we just got an A/C unit! We’d had a window mountable one, but no brackets and literally one option that wasn’t very ideal as far as placement is concerned (it has to go on the back of the house per our HOA, so in our bedroom, but our room is small and our bed is only about 2 feet from the window). So we went to Home Depot (you will notice we go there A LOT for our house stuffs) and got one of the A/C units that sits on the floor and has a hose that you put in the window against the screen. Well, once again, where to put it?

Right now it’s in the powder room, which makes it a little snug in there. There also seems to be a bit of an airflow problem… the cool air is mostly getting stuck in the powder room. I put a fan in the walkway thru the dining room into the living room, and it’s helping a tiny bit. But we don’t really have anywhere else to put it right now… If it goes in the kitchen, then we lose the only truly functional counter space we have because the hose will go over it; the current state of our bedroom (in need of some organizing and rearranging) means there is no floor space for it, plus the bedroom door stays closed to keep our two kitties out of it since I’m allergic; the office window is ultimately where we would like to keep it, but right now we can’t. We have too many desks (we’re trying to sell two of them right now), so the only spot for the litter boxes is right under the window, so the A/C would be in their way.

Despite the majority of the air being stuck in the powder room, it is helping keep the house from getting as hot. The living room got up to 79.3°F (we have a digital thermometer), but it is mostly holding! Yes, I’m excited about 79.3°F. Our porch is currently 98.8°F, and when our porch gets that hot it’s normally going to be over 80°F in the house. When our living room got up to 79°, it was only 96° on the porch, so even though it’s climbing a tiny bit since the sun is getting hotter and more direct, it’s still significantly cooler in here. 🙂 So I’m pretty happy.

This is actually July 2014, but it really shows how the temperatures work inside and out

I’m really hoping that this new unit makes things a lot easier for me. The inability to regulate my body temperature very well came with the POTS. It really sucks. I go back and forth between being cold and being way too hot way too quickly. Having a neutral temperature, well more neutral than 80°+, will hopefully allow me to do stuff around the house during the day! I’m really hoping that getting my POTS under control will mean my body temp doesn’t flip out anymore. I hate having hot flashes, or random chills… but everything I read about POTS doesn’t give any suggestions to help with the temperature regulation issues (which sound fairly common).

Do any of you have any ideas, other than the A/C? Ideas that will help when I’m not at home would also be greatly appreciated!