tally

Last night I cooked yellow squash. I finished late, and it was still warm outside so I couldn't open the windows to air out the cooking smells from the house.

Today I opened all the windows to air it out. With the A/C off, the temperature got up to 88 inside, but felt nice to me with the fans on. So I left the windows open all day.

As the windows were open, I washed a load of items with mildew and other stains along with 2 bleach tablets in the washer. (My use of chlorine bleach is seldom enough that liquid bleach usually degrades before I can use the bottle up. Tablets don't have that problem.) The windows being open prevents the bleach smell from bothering me.

As the windows were open, I also baked some things from the freezer in the oven. It seemed a good idea as the heat and baking smells could dissipate out through the windows, without making the A/C use more energy (since it wasn't on).

Coincidentally, part of the reason I wanted to use up some of the things in the freezer is because there's always the slight worry that if the power goes out for a long time, the food will melt and go bad. The strong storm we had on June 25 only made my power flicker a few times (although it ripped some siding off my soffits), but my mom's power was out for 11 hours. Before that, my power was out for 2 hours from a storm on June 14.

This evening, several hours after the baking, my refrigerator started beeping and showing the Too-High-Temperature warning icon. Uh-oh. I hadn't had the door open more than usual, and I hadn't put any hot food inside it. I wasn't sure if it could be due to the house temperature being higher than usual. This isn't the first time I've had the windows open in warm weather, but it's the first time the refrigerator had a problem with it. I closed the windows and turned the A/C back on. I took the grate off the bottom of the fridge and checked the coils. I vacuumed some dust out, but they didn't look too bad. I took the back panel off the fridge to check back there. The fan was still running. The compressor was very hot. The finger I touched it with didn't get burned, but it was hot enough to make me jerk my finger back.

The fridge kept giving the high temp warning for over an hour, but then it finally stopped. That's a relief.

I wonder if that was a sign of the refrigerator being too old to handle a warm house, or if new refrigerators would have the same problem. The fridge is 41 years old. 88 degrees inside really doesn't seem that high to me. I suspect that in the old days, people got refrigerators before they got air conditioners.