Heart and Mind

The A/C Up-Down

I'm a guy who likes air conditioning. I like it when it's crisp and a little breezy in the room. Usually, when other people are complaining that they're cold, I'm enjoying it. Sometimes I can get uncomfortable in a frigid room if I'm trying to sleep, but during the day, this rarely happens. Even if I am feeling a little cool, myself, it's a coolness I enjoy. I guess it's in the same way that I enjoy a refreshing swim in cold-ish water sometimes.

But, you see, I have a problem whenever I need to talk about making adjustments to the air conditioning in the room. For example...

Let's suppose it's a little stuffy in the room.

In that situation, I will usually say, "We should turn the air conditioning up," and what I mean by it is, yeah, we should crank that A/C unit and make things colder in here.

But that confuses the matter, because an air conditioner works on a thermostat that is descending in nature. In other words, if you "turn the A/C up," you're actually turning it down! If you turn it up from 72 degrees to 74 degrees, you're making the room warmer, telling it not to switch on until the temperature raises up two degrees higher then it was before you turned it up. And, in theory, it should maintain that 74 degrees, whereas before it was maintaining 72 degrees.

So that makes me think I should say, "We should turn the air conditioning down,." But then we have the same problem. "Turn that damn air conditioner down" sounds like you're saying it's too cold.

This may all seem cheeky and of minor importance, and I guess it is, but no matter how you slice it, it still is blog worthy because none of the cheekiness negates the fact that I still get tripped up every time I'm trying to tell someone what they should do with the air conditioning. It's annoying.

posted by Steve @ 12:39 AM