We had a power outage today, which is not at all unusual. Apparently here in Kanata we are serviced by one of the oldest, most fragile power grids in Ontario, and we have an outage at least once a month or so. It sucks, but I’m quite adept now at resetting all our clocks, and working the manual override on our automatic garage door opener.
The last power outage we had was a couple of days ago. It was really hot and humid and the power cut out right at 5:30, when (we assume) everyone got home from work and cranked up their air conditioners. Sir Monkeypants and I did the responsible thing and turned off our air so it wouldn’t drain the system when the power did come back on (which took a couple of hours), but most people didn’t do that, because you could hear major air conditioning hums from all over the street as soon as the power did come back on.
So chatting about air conditioners reminded me of an article I had read on the weekend in the paper about how to save money on your hydro bills. It recommended raising your air conditioner temperature setting from 19 degrees Celsius to 22 degrees Celsius. I found it impossible to believe that anyone out there seriously sets their air conditioner to 19 degrees. We keep ours set at 25 during the day, 24 at night. Is that freakishly high? I remember one summer I had a roommate who set the air at 20 degrees and I thought he was insane — I spent the whole summer wearing sweaters and drinking hot chocolate.
On the other hand, however, we are very bad with the heat in the winter. We have tried setting it to 20 degrees, but we just shiver all the time, so we’ve given in and now we set our heat at 22 degrees. So maybe over the whole year, someone who keeps their thermostat at 19 degrees summer and winter is being just as responsible as us…
Where do you set your thermostat, summer and winter?
TurtleHead 
I rant almost daily about why the rest of the world insists in living in the cold. It annoys me to no end. When I read your post, the second I read “19 degrees”, I exclaimed “what the hell?” just as you did. What the hell?!
Your temperature settings are great — don’t feel bad about wanting it 22 in the winter. That’s normal. Well, actually, I’m a couple degrees above you. In the summer, I like indoors to be 25 or 26. In the winter, a lovely 24. is the same, and we’re both always a little bit chilly when we come to your house, so imagine how we suffer when we go to other people’s houses!
Ok, that’s just silliness…in the summer, our house is at about 24 or 25, and in the winter around 22 or 23. I can’t understand people wasting so much money to keep their house at 19…I mean, we only get a few weeks of summer ’round here people!!! Enjoy it while you can!
Hmmm, I think we set it for about 65F/18C in winter. We only use the A/C on a manual basis, because using the drapes during the day and opening the windows in the evening seems to get us through most of the time. Right now it’s 80F/27C, and reading your post just made me realize it’s warm in here (okay, opening windows now).
A few years ago here in California we had the Energy Hostage Crisis, where the power tycoons conveniently decided to service their power plants simultaneously, until we agreed to pay them ridiculous sums of money. Since then we haven’t had any outages. During our crisis, Californians conserved power by turning their Christmas lights off during the day.
Okay, so if I can be allowed to rant about wastefulness … one time I flew to Burbank, and as I came out of the airport, I saw what I thought was an only-in-L.A. kind of sight:
A woman stopped in an airport passenger loading zone, in her Mercedes, which was still running, with the A/C going, the sunroof open, standing up through the sunroof and talking on her cell phone …