I'm sending this one out to all the oscillating fans out there and to the special one in the room next door. Thank you. Thank you.
A form of late-spring-like weather finally came to visit us in Madison yesterday. While I'm loving the warm weather during the day, it can be tough to sleep at night when it's 75 and humid. All of this could be solved with ceiling fans, but alas, we do not have one, and our apartment is one of 1000+ owned by the university. They are not inclined to carry out special requests.
So we resumed the debate from the previous two summers: What should we do to keep our apartment reasonably cool at night? We have a window unit AC that sits in a hole in the wall in the living room and cools it about as well as if we left the refrigerator door open. It's great to stand in front of if you are sweaty from commuting home or to cool the room down after cooking dinner, but the way our apartment is laid out, it's hard to get that cool air back to the bedroom. Did we need a stronger AC? At $300, the answer was "No." Plus we weren't sure it would make much difference since the real problem was air flow, not amount of cold air produced.
This was someone's fan science
and technology PhD project. Credit
Did we want a different fan? We had a fan that perched on top of the dresser, but it didn't actually blow air on us. Yes, yes, we needed a new fan. Fans are cheap (compared to air conditioners) and circulate air, which was the goal. But did we want a cool new Star Trek-looking fan or an old-school oscillating fan? Which would be tall enough to blow air on us while we were sleeping? I mean, I want balmy summer breeze here, people. And more importantly, which would be the less death-trapish option for our tiny bedroom. Because I'm pretty sure we discussed the oscillating fan option before but ruled it out because of it's middle of the night tripping hazard.
Maybe I just wanted
to pretend I was on Mad Men.
Is that so wrong? Credit.
At the end of the day Target trip, we decided on the old school fan, and oh yeah, it was great. We had to turn it up to "jet engine" to cool things down enough, but it fanned right at sleeping level and increased my comfort and quality of life by 1000%. I'm not sure how Daniel feels about it because he was tinkering with it at about 4am. Sorry, but the butterfly whisper setting is not going to cut it. So maybe it's going to go back to the fan orphanage Target, but until then... I just can help myself... I love you, fan.
