![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
adrian_turtleHere it is near the end of July, and I am pleasantly surprised not to have needed the air conditioning in my apartment yet this year. Part of that may be relatively mild weather, compared to the previous 3 years I've lived here. But the really remarkable thing is that my apartment on the 6th floor is not routinely 20-30 degrees F hotter than the outside of the building at ground level. 85F is so much more livable than 110 it's ridiculous, even with the same air movement and humidity.
Why is this summer different than previous years? I have better curtains, and that probably helps. I don't mean better curtains from an interior-decorating perspective. There's no valance, and they don't come to the floor, and there's no gauzy stuff across the middle to let all the heat in. I just folded a flannel sheet in half and hung it over the curtain rod. It blocks MUCH more light than the vertical blinds that came with the apartment. And there's no problem opening the window! Unlike blinds, a curtain can be blown about without rattling, and without being torn loose. And one can open a curtain without moving it directly in front of where the window opens.
Or maybe it has nothing to do with anything I'm doing. Maybe my neighbors downstairs are doing something differently. It seems unlikely that someone would have their heat on in the summer, but they might have been trying to incubate a dragon or something. (Not that I've seen one.) Or they might have baked a lot. Or maybe they were using their air conditioning to dump hot air outside, and the hot air was rising to my apartment. There are 4 apartments under me, and some of them have new tenants.
Why is this summer different than previous years? I have better curtains, and that probably helps. I don't mean better curtains from an interior-decorating perspective. There's no valance, and they don't come to the floor, and there's no gauzy stuff across the middle to let all the heat in. I just folded a flannel sheet in half and hung it over the curtain rod. It blocks MUCH more light than the vertical blinds that came with the apartment. And there's no problem opening the window! Unlike blinds, a curtain can be blown about without rattling, and without being torn loose. And one can open a curtain without moving it directly in front of where the window opens.
Or maybe it has nothing to do with anything I'm doing. Maybe my neighbors downstairs are doing something differently. It seems unlikely that someone would have their heat on in the summer, but they might have been trying to incubate a dragon or something. (Not that I've seen one.) Or they might have baked a lot. Or maybe they were using their air conditioning to dump hot air outside, and the hot air was rising to my apartment. There are 4 apartments under me, and some of them have new tenants.
