Heat!!!

Heat! Heat! Beautiful, warming heat! Marvelous, delicious heat!

Do you get the idea I now have heat in my apartment? I HAVE HEAT!!! Oh, the joy of heat!

I kind of wish I didn’t have heat.

OK, let me backtrack and take you through this whole thought process.

I’ve been living in my new apartment without heat this whole time, as I believe you know. And, as you can imagine, the closer we get to the Winter Solstice, the colder it has gotten. Unlike last year the march to cold this winter has been gradual. Last year it got cruelly cold ruthlessly quick. In fact, last year was Wuhan’s most brutal winter on record. That record-breaking winter coinciding with the first year of my China adventure, I guess you could say Mother Nature was breaking me in the hard way.

Or, the Fates were throwing everything they had at me in an attempt to make me run away. It didn’t work, obviously.

So now I suppose that the Fates have given up on sending me, deranged and disillusioned, back to America.

This second year in Wuhan has proven very amiable and amenable indeed. New apartment, deepening ties with my dear friends in the States, lots of good friends and good times in China, no illness and a much better grasp on how to live here, how to teach and how to speak Chinese.

Life is good. Right now, for me. For some, life is still hard. Please keep those people in your thoughts and prayers. If your life is not so good, you are in my thoughts and prayers. You are, anyway. But I digress…

This past week the temps have dipped into the upper 20’s overnight, and it has not been much warmer during the day. Mildly uncomfortable, but I had my space heater, my bed heaters, my hot water bottle and lots of clothes to wear. I was not dismayed at the cold. I had a system, even. Get out of bed and, while the body is still sleep-warm, take a shower and get dressed. Do what I have to do – teach, shop, clean… whatever I have to do that day. When I’m stationary/sedentary, such as when I eat my meals or write to you or play computer Scrabble, I turn on the space heater. Turn on bed heaters about 1 hour before going to bed, crawl into nice, warm berth (fully appreciating the heat), sleep the sleep of the just and get up and do it all again the next day.

It was a good system. But now I have heat!

I know what you’re going to say: “Just keep to the system and save the heat for when you really need/want it!”

That’s a great idea, but I can’t. Poor Sam sent me a text message the very day that Mr. Wang himself, my greatest fan (his words, not mine) and the head of maintenance personally came by to fix all of the heaters in my house. Sam was staying on campus that night, it being one of his 3 nights a week he does so and his apartment also has no heat. Unfortunately his apartment happens to be on the 5^th floor (of the administration building, if you must know) and he was catching a heavy draft from arctic wind blowing around. His apartment was substantially colder than mine ever got.

He descended from his lofty position on the 5^th floor for a warming glass of wine or three and some conversation. He left two hours later, slightly inebriated but much warmer and toting my space heater.

With Sam in possession of my space heater, I cannot go back to my system if I wanted to. I COULD just go back to the old days when I just plain froze and made no use of my space heater but it is too cold for that. So now I am compelled to turn on the heater. Just the one in the living area, not the ones in the bedroom or office.

Now I’ll bet you’re wondering: why do I kind of wish I had no heat?

Well, because this unit, while very good at dispensing heat, is also very inefficient. Or rather, I should say it dispenses heat efficiently but is not very ‘green’. It is a heat pump – basically an air conditioner that reverses its function in the winter. Those are only efficient up to the 40-degree outside temperature range. If it gets any colder than that outside, they have to run continuously to keep the inside warm. And, the inside temp only gets up to about 65 degrees. Not exactly balmy, but a far cry warmer than the low 50’s that I endure with no heat. It eats a lot of electricity, as you can imagine.

Fortunately I’m not worried about my electric bill. Or my water bill, for that matter. It appears, according to Sam that I’m living here for free, and have been since I moved in here.

Because I moved in prematurely (remember that amorous rat crawling on my leg while I slept?), the developer has not yet hired a management company to manage the property. Any utilities charges incurred are considered a part of the building process and are automatically paid by the developer. So, my utility usage has been absorbed into the cost of construction. So far no one, least of all me, has complained. Once people start moving in it will be back to standard: each dweller will pay for their utilities usage. Till then, I’m not being shy about turning on a heater.

I am concerned about the environment however, so I’m only turning on the heater I need, not all the heaters and all the lights in the house. Free utilities is no reason to be wasteful, is it? And there I am, digressing again… back to the point, now.

Another reason running this heat pump is not that great a thing is that such devices, by nature, are dehumidifying. I don’t think I told you that the air here is so dry I can literally feel my sinuses dry up. I must constantly drink something, sometimes in great draughts, to get rid of that itchy, sticky feeling in the back of my mouth where my nasal passages join my oral cavity, just before plunging down into my glottis. And that is just when I’m out and about. When I’m home and running the heat pump, I must also run a humidifier full blast AND drink great quantities of liquid.

How bad can it be, you ask? Well, it gets pretty bad when your hair gets listless, brittle, dull and ACTUALLY FALLS OUT for lack of humidity. When the skin around your eyes sinks into your eye sockets for lack of moisture, adding 10 years to your appearance. Running to the bathroom every quarter hour is not a fun game either.

I’ve talked about the aging issue enough for you to know how much it matters to me. I don’t need to accelerate the process by dehumidifying myself.

One more reason why I’m not necessarily gleeful about having my environment heated: being warm while being home makes it very hard to leave home. When I step out of my apartment I’m not getting into a car whose climate control unit will kick on as soon as the engine has generated enough heat. Nor am I headed to a warm classroom to teach – if you’ll remember from last year’s winter postings, none of the classrooms are heated. No, none of that, my friends. Once I leave this temp-regulated apartment I am again subjected to the elements. It was easier to manage the disparity between inside and outside when inside’s temp closely matched outside’s temp. Now my body is constantly having to adjust to one temperature or another, sometimes several times a day. That can’t be good!

I am not whining. I am telling you that I’ve not found the balance between regulated indoor temps versus savage outdoor temps. I will find that balance, and soon. Probably before some management company starts charging me for utilities.

For now, in spite of the temp disparity, in spite of running a humidifier, in spite of potential cost… I’m glad I have heat.

Final note: as you might intuit from the ‘Crazy Building Methods’ series of posts, maintenance on these buildings is a nightmare. The lack of blueprints give the techs no idea how the water lines run, where the electric lines originate and, in either case, having to chip through solid concrete to get to either one. The maintenance techs, Mr. Wang included, have a veritable struggle trying to fix things. A lot of times they just adopt a ‘There I Fixed It’ (have you ever visited that website? www.thereifixedit.com – hilarious!) approach to repairs.

Thus, when tasked with trying to figure out why the climate control unit bedroom doesn’t work, they simply declared that I should just plug/unplug the unit to turn it on and off. For the unit in the office, they determined the outlet, mounted high on the wall and designed for that heat pump was dead, so they ran an extension cord from another outlet near the baseboard. Once plugged in, the unit ran fine. Unfortunately there are not that many outlets in my office – only two not counting the one designed for use by the heat pump, and I don’t want to sacrifice the only outlet not being used by the computer to a heater. And I don’t want an extension cord spangling itself diagonally across my wall, either. I don’t intend on using that A/C unit anyway.

I have heat. YAY!

C’mon, Winter!