It was 84 degrees in our bedroom at 10 p.m. last night. Not outside. Inside. The outside was still 79 at bedtime, which tells you something about living on the top floor of a brick building in August. The bricks soak up sun all day and give it back all night, and every bit of heat from the two floors below drifts up to us.
We have two window AC units, one in the living room and one in the bedroom, and they help. But they don't do everything, and running both all night would push our electric bill well past what we want to pay. So we've built up a set of habits for getting a decent night's sleep in summer without turning the apartment into a refrigerator.
Start cooling the bedroom early
This was the biggest lesson. If we turn the bedroom AC on when we go to bed, it spends two hours fighting the heat soaked into the walls, the mattress and the air. If we turn it on around 8 p.m. with the door shut, the room is comfortable by 10:30.
- Bedroom blinds stay closed all day. Even though the bedroom doesn't get the direct afternoon sun the balcony side does, the brick wall still heats up.
- Door closed from 8 p.m. so we're only cooling one small room.
- AC set to 74, not lower. Below that, our unit runs constantly and the room never gets much cooler anyway.
- Living room AC goes off when we go to bed. No point cooling an empty room.
The bed itself
Swap the bedding
In June, the duvet goes into a storage bag under the bed and a thin cotton blanket comes out. We switched to percale cotton sheets a couple of summers ago, which feel cool and crisp instead of clingy. I don't think fancy bedding solves everything, but heavy sheets make a hot room feel hotter.
Two pillows, one in the freezer
This sounds ridiculous. Each of us has a thin spare pillowcase that goes into the freezer in a zip bag in the afternoon. At bedtime, swap it on. It stays cool for maybe twenty minutes, which is exactly long enough to fall asleep. Total cost: free.
Separate blankets
Sam runs warm and sleeps on top of the covers by midnight. I like something over me even in a heat wave. Separate thin blankets ended the nightly tug-of-war.
Moving the air
A box fan in the bedroom doorway, on low, pushes the cooled air around and adds steady background noise that masks the stairwell. If it's below 75 outside after midnight, which happens on some August nights, we turn the AC off and put the box fan in the window facing out to pull hot air from the room. Cooler hallway air flows in under the door. It's free cooling, and it makes the mornings noticeably fresher.
Olive has her own approach. She lies flat on the bathroom tile like a dropped scarf and refuses to move until morning. Honestly, she might be the smartest one in the apartment.
Keeping the electric bill reasonable
Our apartment is all-electric, so summer cooling shows up on the bill. Our summer bills tend to land around $85 a month, and our goal is to keep this summer in that range despite the heat waves. What helps:
- Clean the AC filters every two weeks. They're the slide-out kind, and a rinse in the tub takes five minutes. A clogged filter means the unit runs longer for less cooling.
- No oven after noon. Dinners are salads, sandwiches, cold noodles or whatever Sam can grill on the tiny electric grill we use on the balcony.
- Use the timer. Our bedroom unit has a sleep timer. We set it to shut off at 3 a.m., when the outside air is coolest, and the fan takes over.
- Shower before bed, lukewarm. A cold shower feels great for a minute, but lukewarm lets your body cool down gradually and I fall asleep faster.
What didn't work
A bowl of ice in front of the fan. People swear by this. In our room, it melted in forty minutes, made a puddle and cooled nothing we could feel. Cooling gel mattress topper: comfortable for an hour, then it warmed up to body temperature and just felt like sleeping on a phone case. We also tried sleeping in the living room some nights, but the north windows and street noise made it worse, not better.
It's a little after eight now. The bedroom blinds are down, the AC is humming with the door shut, two pillowcases are in the freezer, and Olive is already on the bathroom floor. Sam is on the balcony watching the sun drop behind the buildings to the west, which, from the third floor, is the one view we get. It's still hot. But in a couple of hours, it'll be cool enough in there to sleep.
