Back in the Row House a half a dozen years ago, we hired an electrician to install a ceiling fixture and some ceiling fans, and I reveled in those. Two years ago, we were in Panama for an extended amount of time, and although the Airbnbs that we stayed in had air conditioning—after all in Panama, the temperatures are always between 80 and 90, and so is the humidity—they had no ceiling fans, and I missed them.
So when we moved into this condo back around Christmas time, we considered getting a ceiling fan in my bedroom. In February, we had an electrician come and give us a quote, but maybe February is not the best time of the year to be thinking about cool breezes, and we told him, "I'll think about it and get back to you." After all, all that work is a bunch of money, and it's good to sit and think before you randomly spend a bunch of money.
By the time May rolled around, I was very glad I'd given myself time to think, because I had in fact changed my mind: Instead of getting a ceiling fan installed in my bedroom, we asked the electrician to install fixtures for three ceiling fans, one in each room of the condo.
Now, a couple of weeks later, I can say I'm really glad that I made this choice. For a while in early June, the temperatures were hot enough that we actually turned on the air conditioning. (This is the first time in my adult life that I have lived in a place with central air conditioning, so saying that "we turned on the air conditioner" is big honking deal for me.) Having the ceiling fans in conjunction with the air conditioning meant that we could keep the temperature a little warmer and still be comfortable.
The last two weeks, in which the weather has been glorious, has mostly meant opening up the windows all night and closing them during the day. As anybody who has ever read anything at all about passive solar heating and passive solar cooling can tell you, our condo is oriented in the very worst possible way for taking advantage of the sun and the wind. Because the bulk of our windows are on our long western and eastern walls, in the summer this place heats up like a greenhouse – think about parking your car in the sun. The prevailing winds in our area from west to east, but a building to our west blocks those winds, so at night, even with the windows open, the house would not cool down if we didn't have these fans circululating the air.
There's something wonderful about sleeping under a ceiling fan; my time in Panama with only floor fans and wall-mounted air conditioners makes me doubly or triply appreciative of how quiet, unobtrusive, and comfortable these ceiling fans and breezes are.
**
Here's a little irony. My husband has spent the last two weeks on a trip to Europe for some IEEE stuff. He called me to describe the irony of this trip. For much of our married life, his summer travels meant he got away from our un-air-conditioned home and basked in the hotel air conditioning. This summer, for the first time ever in our married life, we own a place with whole-house (well, whole-condo) air-conditioning, but the beautiful-yet-historic hotel in France had zero air conditioning, AND there have been epic heat waves there, and so he sweltered in style.
Fortunately, we've had a lot of practice at that!
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