Portable, Single Room Air Conditioner May Help Keep Family Together in the Summer Months

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My family and I live in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Not in the mountains, or even in the "foothills", but at the base of the foothills. Elevation: 5003 feet.

Those who don't live in Colorado erroneously believe that Colorado never gets hot.

Sure, compared to the South, no, it doesn't really get too hot. Combined with the humidity, the Southern states havthe type of heat that words cannot describe (I know. I grew up there).

Even compared to the scorching Midwest summers (where I attended college), our Colorado heat isn't too horrible.

But, it's all relative.

After you've lived here for a little while (a year or two), and your body becomes acclimated to all of the environmental changes, you still get hot in the summer. Just ask anyone who has lived here for a while.

Since our house doesn't have central air conditioning, we decided to invest in a single room air conditioner.

We considered getting one that mounts in the window, but we have multiple rooms in our home that needed cooler air, and we also did not want to have an unattractive single room air conditioner hanging out of the window.

After some careful research (and about a month of weighing the pros and cons), we concluded that a portable, single room air conditioner would be the best choice.

Why?

We don't live in a big house. Our primary rooms are pretty small. The living room is only about 500 or 600 square feet, and the kitchen/dining room area is about the same. The master bedroom is also approximately the same size... maybe a tad smaller.

So, we purchased the DeLonghi PAC C120 Portable 12,000-BTU Single Room Air Conditioner.

That was in the beginning of our 2009 summer.

Now, here's the funny part of the story that I alluded to in the title...

When we purchased our single room air conditioner on wheels, my expectation is that it would help cool off whatever room we happened to be in at the time.

It did.

But what I did NOT expect was how it managed to help bring our family together. On the hottest days, all the kids and the wife and I would end up congregating around the single room air conditioner unit!

If you have teenagers, you'll realize how much of an accomplishment this is.

It certainly wasn't something that we had planned on.

When the unit was in the living room, everyone was in the living room. When I rolled the single room air conditioner into the dining room for dinner, everyone followed.

After dinner, we would play cards or just sit around and talk about the events of the day. It was a very nice way to stay cool in the summer until the sun went down.

Looking back on it, I believe that it was more of a subconscious act on the kids' part than anything else. Honestly, it wasn't something that we realized was happening at the time. It was only after it stopped happening that we realized how nice those hot days in the summer really were.

So, if you are trying to keep the family cool in the summer, look into purchasing a portable, single room air conditioner. I can't promise that it will bring your family closer... maybe I just got lucky.