I don’t have an air conditioner. Am I smug about it? But that’s because it’s all I’ve got to hold on to when I’m lethargic, smelly and faintly dehydrated all summer.I tell myself that I can’t afford an air conditioner, but I think I might just be cheap. Plus, I always begin each summer optimistically: I tell myself that summer’s not all that bad! That I can do this! But that’s in May, when it’s always in the 70s.In July, the heat is relentless, my apartment never gets below 90 degrees, and I’m cranky. By then, I’ve got it in my mind that it’s too late in the summer, that I don’t have enough money for an AC unit, and I’ll just have to wait it out. Plus, I think heat is a little bit like pain: You remember it’s bad, but you quickly forget just how bad.But am I really saving money by not having an AC? What about the discomfort, or the lack of sleep, or the terrible sweatiness? By my logic, I deserve lots of treats for saving myself from high electricity bills.

Do those treats add up to more than the cost of a window unit? I’ll go with this unit recommended by The Wirecutter since they already did the research, saving me from sweating over my laptop. Total cost: $219Let’s go ahead and say I keep it for five years, because that’s how long the first reviewer on Amazon said the AC compressor is good for (and again, I’m cheap).I used this website which shows how much electricity household appliances use, and plugged in the type of AC I’d use, and estimated I would use it 20 days per month, 10 hours per day. Total cost per month: $54 (adjusting for inflation)Total cost per summer: $209Total cost for five years: $1,045Thinking back on the last few years, here are all the ways I’ve tried to beat each summer the heat, sans-AC:• Ice cream cones: $20/month• Lemonade and other refreshing beverages: $30/month• Movie tickets: $25 (I’m not a big movie person, but they do have some good AC)• Doing laundry nearly twice as often because I’m sweaty

: $6.50/month• Lunches bought at work because it was too hot to cook the night before: $32/month• Dinner out because it’s too hot in my apartment: $30/month• 75% more showers: let’s just say $20 for extra soap and shampoo• Electricity bill from running a fan all night: $0.18/night according to this website, $6/month• And finally, there’s the inevitable day each summer when I crack because I’m so uncomfortable that I march to the nearest clothing store and buy myself some new summer dresses, and immediately feel guilty: $100 per summerTotal cost per summer: $518Total cost for five years: $2,592Verdict: Wow. The numbers do not lie, and although I am a thrifty lady, it seems as though AC would be the way to go. I just need to first get over my internalized notion that AC is a luxury I can do without, or that having one means I will be cooped up in my apartment all summer. I need to finally admit to myself that I am a person who cannot deal with the heat. And then I will go buy an air conditioner.

Immediately.Emily Stephenson lives in New York. She recently made the budget-friendly switch from fancy ice cream trucks to Mister Softee.how do i know if i need a new ac unitThere are few sentences in the English language less believable than “I’m going to build my own air conditioner.” red dot ac catalogThe amount of daring and hubris required to even utter such a phrase is rare enough to be found only in the very smart, or the very stupid. do you need to cover your ac unitBut it’s hot, dammit, and desperate times are calling for desperate measures. The rent is too damn high, and the weather is too damn hot — surely there must be a solution to this. It’s only August, and the season isn’t over yet. And so, now in the summer of our discontent, the time has come to put ingenuity to the test, to throw both caution and reason into the wind and to laugh loudly in the face of ConEd.

If global warming is a scientific problem, one has no choice but to propose a scientific solution: the DIY air conditioner. Several models are floating around the internet. But do they work? IS THIS A THING PEOPLE ACTUALLY DO? Research — also known as Internet rumors — suggests that it is possible to build your own air conditioner for about $30-40. The idea originated when an unnamed university forbid students from having air conditioners in their dorm rooms, and a group of enterprising young people took it upon themselves to defy this rule and build one themselves. This story has been floating around Lifehacker since 2005, and has since been revamped twice by increasingly enterprising and decreasingly sweaty young college students. Unsurprisingly, the definition of “air conditioner” in these circumstances is a bit loose, expanded vaguely to “something that blows cold air.” Their model was built off the idea of a “swamp cooler,” which relies on the evaporation of water rather than vapor compression to cool the air that it circulates, or at least that’s what Wikipedia says.

Since the initial attempt (which was apparently successful), there have been a number of elaborations and variations on the process, ranging from a wet shamwow behind a box fan to an electrified ice chest to a double-bucket gravity contraption that only god and nerds know how to assemble. The options are endless, and a little bit daunting for someone who doesn’t even own a screwdriver. OK, HOW DO YOU BUILD THE DAMN THING? As previously mentioned, some designs for the A/C are more complex, requiring pumps and copper wire. Others relied on gravity to get the job done. This one requires something called a Seachoice bilge blower, which sounds difficult to acquire and maybe even a little gross. The chosen candidate for this experiment is the redneck air conditioner, brought to us by the reliable folks filming themselves doing reasonable things on YouTube. The idea is that the fan will blow air into the cooler, and the ice will cool the air before funneling it out through the pipe elbow.

And there you will have it: air conditioner. •   1 Styrofoam cooler ($6) •   1 Pipe elbow ($3) The Home Depot ran out of fans, which is both stupid and funny as well as scary and possibly apocalyptic. Maybe you are somebody who already has a fan. Maybe your fan fortress is the reason that Home Depot no longer has any. If that’s the case, good on you – you’re saving money on this part of the project. As far as everything else is concerned, the Styrofoam cooler was acquired from a Rite Aid, and the rest of the materials came from bodega-style hardware stores. Step 2: Cut two holes in the Styrofoam container, one on the side for the pipe elbow, and another on the top for the fan. Place fan and pipe in respective openings. Secure the openings with duct tape. Red duct tape earns extra urgency points. Step 3: Fill the container with ice, and maybe beer if you feel so inclined. Step 4: Replace the lid of the container and turn the fan on. Step 5: Grab a beer, leave the room, and let the cooler do its thang.

Okay, so, show of hands: who’s surprised this didn’t work? After half an hour of waiting for the magic to happen, it soon became apparent that probably only magic — not science —  could coax cold air out of this contraption. It might be a bit of an exaggeration to say that this DIY A/C unit actually made the room hotter, but between closing the window and the door and funneling the fan’s full windpower through a tiny tube, it’s entirely possible that it actually did. On top of that, the ice was quick to melt and would have been put to better use in glasses of water or perhaps even that kiddie pool you almost threw away. Are there improvements, tweaks and tricks that could bring this idea to life? But let’s be real here: if air conditioners were easy, everyone would have one. If you’re still desperate during these last long legs of summer, you could hunt around for a cheap A/C unit, which you could probably swing for about $70. Not only is that the cost of about two of these DIY versions, it would probably blow around at least twice as much hot air.