Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Air conditioning?

As I posted about before, we moved our bedroom upstairs in our house.  I love having our room up there, but I am VERY nervous about spending the warmer months up there. 

This part of Italy gets VERY hot and humid in the summer, and last summer, when we were downstairs, with the A/C unit right outside our door, I had issues sleeping because I was so hot.  Now that we’re upstairs, I think it’s going to be even hotter, and we won’t have the A/C unit right outside our door.  I’m wanting to get an A/C unit for our room upstairs, but Mark doesn’t seem to be that interested in getting one.

There’s no such thing as central air/heat in Italy.  Most, if not all, houses are heated by radiators, unless they’re heated by a wood-burning fireplace.  We have one TINY A/C unit, that they installed before we moved in, to cool off our entire house in the summer.  As you can imagine, that doesn’t work out so well.  So I’d really like to get another one for upstairs, but I’ve heard that they can be a real pain because of the water they give off and also you have to vent them somewhere.  If we had to vent it out the window that would pretty much defeat the purpose of having an A/C unit upstairs because the windows here open from the center.  I can either swing both sides of the windows open completely, or I can tip the top of the window open about 8-10 inches.  They don’t have windows here like they do in the States, that mostly just slide up and down.

So what would you do?  Ask the landlord to put in another unit (but we’d have the pay for it), get a portable unit ourselves that we could sell when we leave, or just suck it up and deal with the heat?

4 comments:

Em said...

I'd get another unit installed to cool the upstairs. Sleeping when you're all sticky is terrible. Avoid at all costs.

Rachel said...

I would DEFINETLY get another unit, a portable one u could sell if u wanted. I cant even begin to sleep when i'm too hot!

LEWilliams said...

i feel your pain. we don't have air conditionin units at all. it gets so hot at night. i am freak about safety and the windows open makes me crazy.

Fledgling Techie said...

Definitely a portable unit! When we were in Italy, we, blessedly, had 2 A/C's...one on the topmost level and one on the middle level. the downstairs (even with as hot as it got!) was just fine with a box fan to keep cool. Unfortunately, our new place here in Germany has *NO* A/C at ALL! We may be getting a portable unit here, ourselves...LOL