Air conditioning used to be a luxury in my house — now the bill just came in hot

When I was a kid in the late 1960s and into the '70s, air conditioning was a luxury in my house, not a given. Sometime in the early '70s, my parents got a loud window unit for their bedroom, and that door stayed closed. The rest of the house got "cooled" by a giant Sears fan bolted into a window in the back, just enough to pull a draft through. A window unit finally made it into the living room sometime in the mid-'70s. Central air didn't arrive until 1981, the same year they finally got cable TV, and by then I'd already moved out.

Something shifted in the years since. Air conditioning stopped being a luxury and became something closer to a basic necessity, right up there with heat in the winter. The numbers and history back that up. In 1975, only about 13% of Northeast homes had any form of air conditioning. By 2020, that number was 89%. My own family's timeline, no AC to a window unit to central air, basically traces that exact curve, just a few years ahead of the national pace.

This summer put that shift to the test

Our AC has run almost the entire summer. I can count on one hand the days we got away with open windows, maybe three all season. Heat waves kept stacking up, one after another, and the unit just never really got a break. I don't handle the bills in my house, my wife does, but she told me the electric bill came in around $410 recently. We pay it. What choice do we have? The utility company knows exactly what we're going to do every single hot day, run the air, and keep running it.

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New Jersey thermostat

And then, right on cue, a rate hike request

I've written about this already, twice now. JCP&L filed for an 8.8% rate increase last week, about a month after widespread outages left thousands of customers without power, without air conditioning, during a heat wave. And they filed it despite Governor Sherrill's own rate freeze promise from her first day in office. The only time our AC hasn't run all summer is when the power's been out entirely. Everything else, it's been on. The utility knows that. They're counting on it. And now they want more for it.

The heat waves are probably winding down as we get into September. But the bills won't cool off nearly as fast. Anyone who ran their AC all July and August is going to be looking at bills that stay hot well into the fall, right around the same time the rest of us start bracing for what a rate hike means for the heating bill.

And yet, for all my griping, I haven't touched the thermostat once to nudge it up a degree and save myself the aggravation. My dad, who raised us kids on a Sears fan bolted to a window frame, would take one look at my thermostat setting and have plenty to say about it. He wouldn't be wrong, either. I'll take the guilt. I'm just not touching the thermostat.