Nothing like a little extra AC
I finally went and picked up my birthday present from last year: an air conditioner for my office. Last year, I waited until it was too late to find them locally. This year, when I saw the Sharp CV-P09FX at Costco, I jumped on it.
We do have central air conditioning in our house. In the summers in the Seattle area, you need it. The problem is, that’s not enough for my office. My office is above the garage, basically in the roof. It has lots of computers running. It also gets the afternoon sun. As a result, it is at least ten degrees (farenheit) warmer than the rest of the house on an average day. This happens in the winter as well, but at least then I can crack the window and cool down pretty quick. In the spring and summer, it doesn’t do anything or makes matters worse.
Since my office is the only room that needs extra AC, and there are restrictions by our homeowners association about unsightly ACs sticking out of windows, I opted for something that was more or less inside my house, except for the exhaust of course, which goes out the window. I also wanted something that could be installed “temporarily” since we plan on building another house next year. I also wanted something fairly low maintenance.
This Sharp unit seems to fit the bill. It occasionally needs to be drained of water and needs to have its filters cleaned, but that’s about it. It’s on wheels, so I can move it around somewhat, though the exhaust hose limits how far it can be moved. I will need to work on the installation in my window sill since screwing holes in my window frame isn’t going to happen, but my father-in-law is helping with that.
Prior to firing this thing up at around 8:30pm or so, my office was a sweltering 84 degrees. By the time I came upstairs again at 11pm, my office was a comfortable 75 degrees. Now granted I was running it full blast at the end of the day when it starts to cool off anyway, but that’s still pretty impressive. I suppose the real test will be tomorrow during the workday. Tomorrow is scheduled to be a warm day (about 80 degrees). It will be interesting to see if I can keep the temperature low tomorrow…
