Our Own R2D2

I mentioned a while ago that we can't do central air conditioning in our house because of the heating system we have.  Our house is heated with hot water, so that means our furnace is a boiler and the hot water runs through pipes, which heats the house.  Because we have no forced-air heat runs, we can't cool our house with our heating system.  This leaves us with the easiest/cheapest option and that is window units.

Every spring/summer, K has to haul up our window air conditioners from the basement.  To cool our house, we need a minimum of three units and that means quite a bit of work for K every spring and fall.  (We have to remove the a/c units because of our winters--we really couldn't afford to keep them in throughout the winter, as the heating costs for the house would skyrocket!)  He is constantly trying to figure out a way to make less work for himself--aren't we all always doing the same ;)--so he keeps looking for lighter/different units we could use.  When he first heard about portable a/c units, he decided we needed to go that route for cooling.  This year he went out and got one.  And here is a picture:

That is our R2D2 unit in the dining room.  It completely took up all of the space between the dining room table and the window--and as hard as I tried, there was no solution to the problem.  Not only did it block the pathway, but I had to move the table further out into the middle of the room and that created an even smaller path through the room from the kitchen to living room!  This did not make me a happy camper, at all.

After running this thing for a few hours, K realized that he did nothing to drain the water from it!  Anyone who has an a/c unit knows that they pour water out the entire time they are running, but with this thing being completely inside, we had to come up with some way to drain the water.  And this is where the bucket came in to the picture.  (And no, I didn't take a photo of it.)  So, a hose was hooked up to the unit and it was put into a bucket to drain.  Problem solved--NOT!!!  For some reason or another, the hose wouldn't screw properly, so the unit poured water onto the floor.  After fashioning an aluminum foil 'pan' to place under the leak, things were a LITTLE better, but I still was cleaning up water every couple of hours.  Obviously, this was NOT going to work.  And K had to agree--finally.  Two days later, the window unit was put in.

We now have a (horribly) expensive R2D2 air conditioner sitting in our basement, unused.  K said he will be hooking it up to use down there, but it hasn't happened yet.  I do believe it will help a lot with cooling this house, but it has to be RUNNING for that to happen.  We find ourselves halfway through the summer and I'm not too positive this thing will run anymore this year, but we always have NEXT year to look forward to.