The thermostat I bought for $9 says 86 degrees. It's 9:40 p.m. on a Tuesday in mid-July, the sun has been down for an hour, and my studio on the top floor of an old brick building is still holding on to every degree from the afternoon. A box fan is pointed at my face. The radiator, which I'll be very grateful for in January, is right now just a decorative piece of metal that's very good at reminding me heat exists.
My dad said it when we toured the place in March: "Good bones. Hot in August." He was off by a month.
I'm not an engineer, but the short version is that heat rises, the roof sits in full sun all day, and a 1920s brick building soaks up warmth during the day and lets it out slowly at night. My studio has no central air, which I knew when I signed the lease in April. What I didn't fully understand was how little the evening cools it down. Outside, the lake breeze kicks in and the air drops to the low 70s. Inside, the walls are still warm.
For the first three weeks of June, open windows and a box fan worked fine. Then July showed up, humid and heavy, and the box fan started to feel like it was just moving warm air around in a slightly faster circle.
The $189 window unit
I bought a small window air conditioner for $189 in early July. Before I signed my lease, I had asked management in writing whether window units were allowed, and they said yes with an approved support bracket, so I bought one of those too. It came out of my "everything else" line and a bit of my fun money for the month.
Installing it took my dad and me about forty minutes on a Saturday morning. He measured three times, checked the bracket was level, and screwed a strip of wood into the window frame so the sash couldn't be pushed up from outside. He also took his hand truck home that same day, in case I'd forgotten it was a loan.
The unit sits in the window above the desk, which is the one closest to my bed. It doesn't cool the whole 480 square feet evenly, but it makes the place sleepable, which was the goal.
What it did to my electric bill
In June, my electric bill was $38. In July, it was $71, almost double. Heat and water are included in my rent, so electric is the only utility that moves with the weather.
The math on the AC so far: $189 for the unit, plus about $33 extra on the bill compared to June. If August looks like July, that's roughly another $30 to $35. So the whole summer comfort plan will cost me somewhere around $255 to $260, counting the unit, for this year. Next summer it should be just the electricity, about $65 to $70 extra across July and August.
My monthly budget had electric at $38. I've decided not to change that line, and instead treat the summer extra as a known seasonal cost and pay it out of the "everything else" money. Same idea as how I think about winter, when my electric should drop but I'll spend more on things like snow gear and car stuff.
How I kept it livable without running the AC all day
A few habits made the biggest difference:
- Blinds down on the sunny side before I leave for work. It sounds tiny. It's not.
- AC only from about 6 p.m. to midnight on the hottest days, with the fan after that. I set it to 76, not 70.
- On work-from-home days, I take my laptop to the Evanston Public Library for the hottest part of the afternoon. Free AC and free Wi-Fi.
- No oven from mid-July on. Sheet pan dinners are on pause. Lots of salads, sandwiches, cold noodles and things from the stove top cooked fast.
- Evenings on the lakefront. I walk down to the lake after dinner a few nights a week, and the breeze is free.
- A wet washcloth in the freezer, which is my mom's trick, on the back of my neck before bed.
Yes, for this apartment. I picked a top-floor studio with heat included and no central air because it was the cheapest all-in option of the three I toured, about $1,385 a month all in, versus about $1,590 for the Skokie one-bedroom I passed on. Even with the AC and the summer electric bump, I'm still well under what the Skokie place would have cost me every single month.
The one thing I'd tell anyone touring a top-floor unit in March: imagine standing in it in July. Then ask about window units before you sign, not after.
It's 10:15 now. The thermostat says 79. I'm calling that a win.
