Buy the fan now, not in September
The warmest weeks of the San Mateo year are still ahead, and most houses here have nothing to meet them with.
Every year the same thing happens. Summer here is cool, everyone congratulates themselves on not needing air conditioning, and then late September arrives with a week in the nineties and the hardware stores are out of fans.
For anyone who arrived this spring, this is the part of the local climate that surprises. The hot weather is not in July. It is in September and October, when the marine layer breaks down and the offshore flow sets up.
What people do about it, in ascending order of commitment:
- Box fans and a night-flush routine. All the windows open after sunset, all of them shut by 8am.
- A window or portable A/C unit for the bedroom. One room cool is enough for most households in a 4-day heat spell.
- A heat pump / mini-split. Increasingly default in remodels, because it handles the 2 weeks of heat and replaces a gas furnace for the sixty nights of winter that need one. There are rebate programs running through the county or the state, and they are worth 10 minutes before a purchase.
The other September items come due at the same time: gutters cleared of whatever the trees dropped, an address confirmed in SMC Alert, and a clear idea of what a public safety power shutoff would mean for the household.