air cons

As I write this, I am sitting in the living room of our current rental apartment, listening to the noise of our dehumidifier rumbling and the air con in the spare bedroom whirring. It's currently 25*C and 89% humidity. We've had a couple of days this week of absolutely sauna-like conditions! Air so thick it felt like you were breathing under a wet blanket! And so what does our main air con in the living room do? Die, of course. And because we move out of this place in a month, and our landlord is selling it, they are not going to replace the air con. Hence why the air cons in the bedrooms have been running most of the day, to try and push some cool air down this way into the living area.

So I am very much looking forward to our 3 new air cons in our new apartment! They are reverse cycle, split systems. This means:

• no ugly, old, dusty air cons sitting in the window like we've had the past few years (see picture on left)

• quiet operation! The only good thing about the one in our rental apartment dying this week is that it sounded like a 747 taking off every time we switched it on! It sat directly over our dining table, which meant summer dinners were spent either yelling at each other over the noise, or sweating into our salads.

• reverse cycle means we can have some heat in winter! I know Hong Kong winters are neither harsh nor long by world standards, but buildings are just not heated here, so once the building cools down in the first couple of weeks of winter, everyone struggles to keep warm with little electric heaters at their feet! Even the northern Europeans and Canadians complain, so I'm not being soft! I look forward to testing out our heating this winter!

• we can set timers on the new air cons, so we can come home to a nicely cooled apartment!

Left: one of the air con engines mounted outside our new apartment, up high so it can be accessed from the rooftop for maintenance

Right: our new bedroom air con