…it’s hot! (Excuse the rather colorful subject line.)

We’re in the midst of record-breaking heat here in Seattle. That means it’s time for me to whine about it in my blog. Hey, I’m a native, I’m entitled; if I lived in Phoenix and complained about the heat, that’d be something different.

Friday, it was 95. That’s a record for that date. Saturday, it was 96. Another record.

Yesterday, it wasn’t a record; it was only 95. But that’s still awfully damn hot for around here. And today it’s up into the 90s again- I think it hit 94 at Sea-Tac airport. The average high for this time of year is around 76, so you know we just aren’t used to it.

It’s usually anywhere from 3 to 5 degrees cooler immediately around my place because I’m only two or three blocks away from Elliott Bay, and that water is pretty cool year-round.

Indiana is acting kind of loopy in the heat. He isn’t eating as much and just lays around. My pad doesn’t have air conditioning but man, am I budgeting for it. Of course, by September I’ll have forgotten about just how miserable hot it is now, and will blow the money on cheap booze and hookers um, something fun.

Actually, in the spirit of saving the earth, I am strongly considering putting in an A/C unit. This might not make sense, since that’ll take more power and thus crank out more greenhouse gasses (ironically adding to the problem I was trying to solve) resulting in global warming, but around here we use a lot more energy for heating than we do for cooling.

The A/C that I’m looking at is from Mitsubishi. It’s not only an air conditioner for cooling in the summer, but heats in the winter because it’s a heat pump. Heat pumps are pretty cool (haha), because they actually draw the heat out of the air outside. They’ll work down to around 45 degrees or so- which is a large part of our fall, winter, and early spring conditions.

And heat pumps are very energy conscious, because they’re using ambient heat that’s in the air. It might seem weird to say that there’s heat “in the air” in the winter, but imagine this- if you had a freezer on the back porch, even when it was only 40 degrees outside, the motor would still run and you’d feel that warm air blow out… well, that’s because the freezer has to “pump” out the heat from the 40-degree air to keep the air inside the freezer at less than 32 degrees.

Soooo… this is all a long way of saying that I’m rationalizing a heat pump/air conditioner. Seriously, I’m on baseboard electrical heat in the winter, so that’s pretty expensive and I bet I save more in heating costs from the heat pump than I’ll spend in cooling costs from the A/C. Plus, I’ll be more comfy, and the dog won’t be all loopy.