I'm sorry if this is the wrong place to post this but I am desperate and am hoping to get some advice. I tried another thread also.
Okay, so we are getting very nervous here. We live on the top floor of a 4 story apartment with an attic above us. We get heat from the neighbor downstairs and heat pushing down on us from the uninsulated attic. To top it off, all of our windows face south, so we get the afternoon sun.
Last year, our AC ran damn near 24/7 and struggled to keep it in the upper 70's inside. We bought a dehumidifier but that did very little for the temperature. We had the AC unit checked and changed the filters every 3 months out of our own pockets. We then had to deal with $400-600 electric bills each month from May to the end of September. With everything going on in the world, we barely made it last year and there is no way possible we can afford bills like that this year! Our AC was turned on for 4 days straight, struggling the whole time, last month and our electric bill was $150 higher for it.
We have tried to take every preventative step that we can think of this year. We bought thermal black out curtains for all of the windows, the windows are side sliders so we bought appropriate 2 way fans, we bought 1 inch thick Styrofoam cut to sit between the fan and top of windows, we put a tension rod at the beginning of the hall (leads to bdrms, bth and utility rm) and put floor to ceiling curtains on it to help keep the areas we are in the coolest, we have oscillating tower fans in every room, we made little "dark caves" for the pets (each with it's own fan), I am rotating their pet bedding in the freezer to help them stay cool, we bought drying racks for our laundry to avoid the dryer, we make meals in bulk on cool nights via crock pot or outdoor grill and microwave the rest of the week, only use LED bulbs, go days at a time without turning on the television or game consoles, and we made some of those homemade swamp coolers.
Down the hall where the rooms are tends to be between 5 and 10 degrees cooler since the curtain has gone up, so we spend most of our time back there, but we can't hear the door or the intercom and 2 grown adults, 2 large dogs and a cat in the bedrooms can make it uncomfortable before long.
We are not allowed to use film on the windows, portable AC units that exhaust air or drip and we have been told that there is no reason to replace our AC unit.
We are in no position whatsoever to move and I am work from home, so we have to find a way to make the best of this. We are desperate for any advice that may help us stay cool that we may not have thought of already.
June 05, 2021 at 02:10AM
