Can you imagine living in Chico without air conditioning? Being a resident in Chico means you’re no stranger to three-digit temps in the summer – heck, it’s warm enough for shorts and t-shirts for a good 6 months out of the year. No doubt you rely on your air conditioning morning, noon and night to keep your house cool and comfortable, at least when the mercury rises as high as it does during the summer months.

If your system isn’t working right, you’ll drop everything to call an air conditioning service company to come out ASAP to get your system doing its job again. In the meantime, Chico offers other ways to try and stay cool, but you won’t be able to help yourself from wondering, how did people ever live without air conditioning? They survived just fine, and the article below tells you how:

Posted by: Apartment Therapy

How Did People Survive Before Air Conditioning?

They built their houses differently.

We may not think about it much, but the invention of the air conditioner radically changed the way people built buildings, especially in the south. You may have noticed that older buildings tend to have much higher ceilings: this allowed heat to rise so that inhabits could enjoy the cooler space below. Deep eaves and porches protected windows from the heat of the sun, and it was common to plant trees on the east and west sides of a house for additional shade.

In addition to this, rooms were designed with windows on opposite sides of the space, which allowed for cross ventilation. Air likes to have a place to go, so opening up a single window won't generate much air movement. But open two windows right across from each other and you can get a nice breeze going. In cases where it wasn't possible to have two windows on opposite sides of a single room, architects would line up rooms in a row, allowing air to flow between them. You can see this in old shotgun homes in New Orleans, or in railroad apartments in New York.

They got outside.

Currently the porch, like the fireplace, is a charming but somewhat vestigial architectural feature. But in the past porches were incredibly important, not just for shading the windows of a home, but also for providing a place where people could sit outside, out of the glare of the sun, and perhaps enjoy a breeze. These days, when it's hot, people flock inside, but in the past it was the opposite:

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These days, a central air conditioning unit is just another standard system that’s a part of your home. We’re fortunate to have the luxury of air conditioning, and there’s no better time to be reminded of that then when your system isn’t functioning correctly in the dead heat of summer.

Before this happens, be prepared and have the number of a trusted air conditioning service in Chico – like Experts In Your Home – ready to call. We’ll try our best to get your system working efficiently again as quickly as we can, and will educate you along the way, so you don’t have to find ways to keep cool while you wait. We are experts in your home.