Musings from Singapore: Sporadic AirCon

Almost everywhere is air conditioned....note that I said ALMOST.

My office is air conditioned, but the elevators are not. And the hallway outside my office, where the elevators are, also not air conditioned. My first day at the office, I had wandered around trying to find the place (I took the correct MRT to the correct stop, but had no idea which way to go once I got off the train. Thus, the wandering). Them I took the unairconditioned elevator and waited in the unairconditioned hallway for someone to let me in.....in the 90 degree heat and 90% humidity. By the time I got into the office, I was a hot sweaty mess.

Most buildings - including my office - have box unit air conditioning (that everyone refers to as AirCon, not to be confused with Con Air, a delightful film from the late 90s in which Nicolas Cage sports a rad mullet) rather than central air. I have several thoughts on this:

• Box units allow for tighter control on the area cooled and the electricity used to do so. At night, I can turn on the bedroom aircon unit, turn off the living room unit, close the bedroom door and stay cool all night, without using electricity to run the living room unit.
• Since it never changes season or temperature here in Singapore, there's no need for a heater. That renders a full HVAC system unnecessary, so maybe unit aircon is more efficient.
• This leads to interesting architectural challenges. My aircon units need an exhaust and fan system, which must be connected to the unit. This means I have a box outside my window that powers the unit. There's one outside my living room window and another outside my bedroom window. My building has open columns in the middle of the building that are JUST for housing these units. In the US, buildings have square (or rectangle or trapezoid or whatever) exteriors and the interior is wholly covered by central HVAC. 

I turn the aircon in my apartment off when I leave in the morning. And if I'm the first in the office (or last to leave), I turn the aircon on and off there as well. It's a different system, for sure. Just another quirk of living in Asia.

And I'm pretty sure that if I had gone to school in Columbia, South Carolina in buildings that had air conditioned classrooms, but not hallways, it would have been a long, sweaty four years. You know, more than it was already.