Garage Air Conditioning & A Tale of Two Hurricanes
After two hurricanes & a malfunctioning main home A/C unit, I now have the ultimate Floridaman luxury item: a garage air conditioning unit (& home backup). Read on for the story!
October 5th, 2024: I and most of my family1 were in Tallahassee, Florida, visiting friends and watching my alma matter Clemson Tigers thrash an off-year FSU in the then-under-revision Doak Campbell stadium. This event marked just over a week since Hurricane Helene hit Florida and surrounding areas on September 26th.
Another storm, Hurricane Milton, was in the Gulf of Mexico… pointed at my home further south in Palm Harbor, Florida.
Read on for more of our Hurricane Milton story👇… If you don’t care about the background, skip forward to the backup/garage air conditioning section. We can still be friends and/or parasocial partners.2
Our friends were quick to invite us to stay with them in Tallahassee, but we instead headed home on Sunday, October 6th, not sure what the future held. After all, everyone knows that hurricanes never hit Palm Harbor (i.e. Tampa metro). Legend–that I may be misremembering and/or invented myself–has it that we are protected by the Indian burial grounds at Philippe Park.3
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Milton Makes Impact
Given the presumed reliability of 👆 statement, it may come as not surprise Milton– who wouldn’t just stay in the basement smashing cockroaches with his stapler–hit just south of us at Siesta Key on October 9th. While it was a destructive storm in its own right, what made it particularly worrisome for us personally was that the local bodies of water were already very full from Helene.
Nonetheless, by 11:00 PM or so that night we watched the eye of the storm pass adjacent to us with no apparent damage. We went to bed, secure in the knowledge that we had endured the worst. Or had we…
Milton Aftermath: my private island, air conditioner submerged… PCB delivery?
The next morning we woke to find water flowing on either side of our house from the forest/swamp area in the back (north/east) of us toward the street in front (south). This land nominally drains through the nearby Brooker Creek, but said creek had expanded into something more like a river… Which now included the area our house was situated on.
We literally owned a private island. Novel… but concerning, as the water continued to rise over the next two days. Fortunately, our house is built high enough that no water got in. Some of our neighbors weren’t so fortunate, and restoration work is still ongoing as of this writing.
The bottom 6 inches of our air conditioning unit, however, was immersed in water for several days. Apparently this is (supposedly) not a problem since the electronics are higher up inside the unit. Nonetheless, I wasn’t keen on mucking about in flood water, and turned it off via the breaker as a precaution.4
Over the next few days, the water started to recede, our kids attempted to fish from the front yard5, and the police showed up–in gigantic camouflage trucks and Humvees–to transport us to a nearby staging area like it was some sort of war zone. From this rally point, my in-laws (who lived a mile or so away) drove us to their house for a bit of normality before returning to our flooded neighborhood.
That part was really strange, since their nearby neighborhood looked nearly normal. The difference of just a mile was like stepping into a different world.
I actually stayed home most of the time when the rest of the family left, getting work done via the (still on) power, and the expanded data plan that Mint Mobile was nice enough to throw our way 💪. And to their credit, Spectrum got our normal Internet working very quickly after the road was passable. DHL even delivered a PCB order from China while the street was flooded. The driver called me to meet him at a less flooded portion of our street.
I was quite impressed with DHL. Actually, I was impressed with a lot of things during this time. Say what you might about Florida, dealing with hurricanes is kind of our thing.
The AC Isn’t working…
Once I felt it was safe, I flipped the AC breaker and… it started malfunctioning. Weirdly, it was a motor inside the house that was the problem, thought the AC guy said he’d seen something similar elsewhere after the storm. Maybe there was a grounding issue. Maybe turning it off for a few days made it unhappy… Maybe it was just a coincidence.
Long story short, our house became very hot. And it was going to be about a week before the proper parts to fix it would be available. I bit the bullet and ordered a portable air conditioning unit for around $400 from Costco.6
It arrived on the day it was scheduled (late in the afternoon), and after happily (and sweatily) taking it from the delivery man, I set it up in our living room, pumping out cool air and providing a modicum of relief from the heat and humidity. To say it cooled the house down sufficiently would be an exaggeration (it was rated for more like a room, not a house), but it at least helped make things tolerable.
Justifying a backup air conditioning unit
While keeping cool for a couple days may seem like a waste of a few hundred dollars, my thought process to justify a backup/garage AC was:
Several days for a family of 5 (+ dog) to be comfortable in a hotel would be far more expensive than ~$400 for a portable air conditioner
Once the main AC was fixed, this would serve as a backup and I could hook it up in my garage to keep things cool during the hot Florida summers
If the power was to to out, I could theoretically run this on a generator/inverter7
I had considered this before, However, like many such things, it was put off for more pressing matters. The storm/outage was the push that I needed to spend the money, and I will be more ready for next time. Nonetheless, the AC unit sat unused in my garage until a few days ago.
Results: garage AC (+ insulation) keep things cool
Toward the end of a recent garage tidying spurt, I finally rolled my AC into place and hooked it up in the garage next to my laser cutter. It does a decent job of keeping this roughly 400 square foot area at a reasonable temperature and humidity, peaking at around 79ºF (26ºC) during the day, while it’s much hotter outside.
One other tip: insulate your garage door. Ideally don’t have it facing the sun all the time. I Insulated my door early on when we bought our house, and it helps take temperatures from extremely hot to just uncomfortable. While I don’t have hard numbers on this, if the sun is turning your garage door into a frying pan, a portable AC unit likely isn’t going to do the job.
As far as where your door faces, that’s a bit more difficult. Mine faces the east, and there are some trees around, which seems ideal for the Northern Hemisphere. Also, I had the floor coated with an epoxy finish. I’m not sure if this makes it any cooler, but it makes the overall environment more pleasant.
Final thoughts: air conditioning – a luxury garage dwellers deserve
Long story short, having an AC unit in the garage is quite nice.
I do a lot of work in the garage. While it’s not my primary income source, many of the articles/pieces of content from which I profit requires a significant amount of time out there. If I’m uncomfortable and/or if I have to take a shower every time I return inside after soldering something together, it is a detriment to my work.
Will having an air conditioner in the garage truly justify the ~$400 initial expense + $58/year electricity costs associated with this rectangular cooling angel? It is hard to say, but I’m certainly not planning on returning it or taking it out of service any time soon!
Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes.
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Addendum/Footnotes:
Me, my wife, and 2/3 kids. The other (youngest) was at gramma’s IIRC. With a big enough family spread, things are often a matter of divide and conquer. The youngest generally enjoys the situation, however, getting a lot of individual attention and likely watching Paw Patrol for more hours than I care to know.
As defined here. If you’d like to take things from parasocial to a social-social relationship, leave a comment, like, or email me: hi@jeremyscook.com - either way, thanks for reading!
We did stop by Costco in Tallahassee and stock up on various goods. Which wasn’t actually that crowded. In fact, there were racks of generators for sale there, which I thought about buying either to use myself or to resell at a huge margin.
Which gets into an interesting question of the morality of such “price gouging” behavior. I’d argue that yes, it is OK to do in this case, as the inflated cash value would be a reward and motivation for potentially truly helping someone out of a jam.
Or maybe you just give it away. Either extreme seems like a proper response here. You’re either helping someone out out of the goodness of your heart, or out of a motivation for profit. Selling it at the purchase price or what have you seems like the weakest of the three options.
But I didn’t buy a generator. Which I didn’t regret that much.
In fact, we barely lost power during this whole ordeal; we rarely do. This may have something to do with the apparent telecom equipment disguised as a church steeple nearby. Which may also explain the repeated messages that I’ve been receiving in my dreams, extolling me to, “arrange landing pad epsilon at coordinate 26109.2.”
WHAT I DID REGRET was not picking up a bag or two of tortilla chips while I was at Costco. We had all the food we needed for a few days (or more) of isolation, but I wanted some of these, and we didn’t have any and/or ran out. That made me kind of cranky.
To be fair to the legend and/or my imagination, it did hit south of Tampa.
Further local rambling👇
Another local legend has it that potato salad-embedded Greek salad was invented by local Greek (actual) legend Louis Pappas because he was the personal chef to General Pershing in World War I. And Pershing liked potatoes and/or potato salad. This amalgamated recipe was then brought back to Tarpon Springs (adjacent to Palm Harbor), where they serve it and also light cheese on fire while yelling OPA! for tourists.
Whether the legend is true is up for debate, but the salad and/or flaming cheese does exist. Both are delicious. And if you try to order potato salad at a Greek restaurant outside of Florida, they will just think you’re a weirdo. At least that’s my experience.
What IS true is that Tarpon Springs flooded quite badly, to the point where most of the Greek-for-tourists area near the Anclote river was shut down for months as the restaurants and trinket shops were repaired. Also notable, is that the long-defunct Pappas restaurant was mentioned on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast #2343 in reference to Joe Pistone, AKA Donny Brasco as the site of a bit of mob activity. Whether THE Pappas restaurant* was involved, or merely a place where they were eating, was a bit ambiguous.
*The name still exists, but as one or more fast casual restaurants a la Moes with Gyros. Not a great place for a mafia meeting.
I normally have no problem with walking around in standard bodies of water, but as flood waters rise, sewage disposal doesn’t always work properly, and one would have to assume there is a non-zero amount of filth and human waste included. After this incident, I purchased some high rubber boots, which will significantly increase neighborhood mobility in any future event.
One might even expect it an AC unit to exhibit better heat exchange properties when submerged, if it was designed for such a situation. Which it obviously isn’t.
No, they didn’t catch anything, but there were definitely fish swimming around… and certainly alligators, though I didn’t see any. However, I would call it a successful fishing trip, as it got them out of the house and entertained for a while.
I’m told the plural of fish is fish. People can give me a break though.
Well, not the actual flood management. There was a rumor that the locks were manipulated in such a way that our neighborhood got flooded as a sort of sacrifice so that another neighborhood further downstream did not get flooded. Sort of a Mr. Spock needs of the many vs the needs of the few situation. Perhaps it was only logical… Perhaps they should have considered this earlier.
Costco didn’t sponsor this post. We do shop there a lot though. It might not make sense for a single person or even a couple, but once you take on a dependent or two, even a pet, such warehouse clubs start to make a lot of sense.
Maybe. The instructions seemed pretty strict on what kind of power source you could use, but it is 120 VAC.