I’m having a competition with a friend at the moment that’s got a lot riding on it.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Not money – although the winner is going to have to shout dinner somewhere pleasant. Not prestige – it’s just between the two of us. There won’t be an award ceremony at the end, or a plaque on a wall someone with the winner’s name, or a presentation by the mayor.
Just the quiet satisfaction of knowing one of us – and I’ll call her Flossie – has beaten the other.
Not that we’re competitive…. actually, that’s not strictly correct. And if I was pushed I’d have to say that’s not correct at all. We’re very competitive on things that matter like this competition, or making sure we’re first in the carpark on Saturday morning before our regular runs so that we have poll position for when we want to leave. Important things like that.
Which is why our latest competition, which has been going for several years now, is met with blank expressions from other friends, a slight roll of the eyes and not much else.
“You’re doing what?” said one of the other friends a week or so ago when everyone was sweltering and it was barely 7 in the morning. We’d been talking about how warm it was overnight and how we dealt with it.
I said I’d had the overhead fan on which was fine. Another friend said she’d been running her air-conditioner for days and was terrified at the thought of her next electricity bill. She asked how much I’d been using mine. I said I hadn’t used it at all since I moved into the house two years ago, because of the competition with Flossie.
“We have a competition to see how long we can go before we have to use our air-conditioners,” I said.
The other friend (and I’ll call her something prim like Ethel, because she’ll hate it), said “That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Me: “And how much do you think your next bill is going to be if you’ve run an air-conditioner for a week?”
We were back to fairly normal temperatures by the time we had this conversation. Running an air-conditioner for days to escape the heat was now just a memory. The looming power bill is all too real.
We were back to fairly normal temperatures by the time we had this conversation. Running an air-conditioner for days to escape the heat was now just a memory. The looming power bill is all too real.
Flossie and I started the competition because we bought and sold houses at roughly the same time. I moved from a house without an air-conditioner to a house with one, and so did she. The competition started as we talked about building design while running around a new, large unit development site not far from where she lives.
Most of the units face west, there are hardly any windows facing south to catch the cooling winds that rush up the coast after hot summer days, the ceilings are minimum height, and the whole effect is like large shoeboxes piled one on top of the other. All will rely on air-conditioning as the setting sun blasts heat for hours in summer, and air-conditioning to beat the chill in winter.
Flossie and I talked about design and why we chose the houses we did. Both houses are close to the coast, were built in an era when air-conditioners were an unheard-of luxury, and where you can use overhead fans and downstairs areas to remain reasonably comfortable, even on hot days. We know we’re fortunate.
Flossie: “I don’t think I’ll ever have to use the air-conditioner.”
Me: “Me either.”
And that’s where the competition started.
The big unit development near Flossie’s house is just one of many going up in the area where I live at the moment. They’re selling for big sums because of where they are, but on a liveability scale from 1 to 10 they’d barely hit 3, in my books.
You can’t move without hearing the words power, energy, electricity, climate change and idiot politicians these days. (Fine, possibly I don’t hear the words “idiot politicians” as much as I’d like, but you get the drift.)
So much of it now is based on the premise that air-conditioning is an essential item. That is certainly true for large parts of Australia away from the coast. I spent a few summer days in Newman, Western Australia, with my brother a couple of years ago and I don’t know how you’d survive there without it.
But too much of this energy debate avoids a bleeding obvious point – a lot of the homes and units we’re building today are so badly designed that air-conditioning is almost an essential item.
Another friend of mine has a son who lives in Sydney, in a very large unit block. She refuses to stay in his unit when she visits because the upstairs bedroom faces west, has no chance of picking up even the strongest of southerlies, and where she spent just one night “feeling like a slowly cooking chook basting in my own juices”.
He relies on a tiny air-conditioner downstairs and pays the price when his power bills arrive. He is a student who can’t really afford big power bills.
Building design matters, because study after study has shown that the more disadvantaged you are, the more likely you are to be living in a poorly designed, poorly insulated building where hot nights become sleepless hells.
Building design matters because we all pay the cost of meeting summer peak demand – with air-conditioning contributing to a reasonable percentage of that peak. It’s been estimated meeting that peak accounts for about 25 per cent of retail electricity costs, a bill that is passed on to all users.
In a world where user pays has been the mantra for decades, which has hit the most disadvantaged the hardest on a percentage income basis, on electricity use we have a situation where people living in houses built to handle their local climate are effectively subsidising people living in poorer-quality buildings that rely on air-conditioning to stay cool.
And some of those houses and units are the newest, biggest and flashiest on the block.