In Defense of the Window Unit

August 23, 2022

“It looked like the grill of an old car shoved through a window.” 

— Shane Cashman, The Atlantic, 2017

A song of compressors, fans, and emerging cicadas swelled in my ears the summer after I graduated high school. My mother rented a small trailer home toward the north-most point of Lake Gladewater in east Texas, where vegetation overcame a twisted pier covered in bird poop leading to the green backyard with pines towering in the heavy air. At night, I would lie still, thinking about college and my new life away from home as the sounds of the lake crept in until a window unit shook back to life, absorbing all other sound with mechanical silence and carrying me to sleep.

One afternoon when my mother was at work, our landlord came over and started beating on the front door and the windows. I was fresh out of a shower, still standing there in a daze as the humidity from the shower mixed with the air blowing from the tired window unit. The man demanded someone come outside. I stayed quiet, convinced I was concealed by the raspy howl from the box in the window. He will go away eventually, I thought. He started calling my name, realizing I was the only one home.

“There’s a fire out here!” the man yelled, his voice sounding earnest and concerned. “Hurry up, there’s a fire under the house!”

Still in a towel, I put on shoes and hurried to the front door. I remember the man wearing camouflage cargo shorts and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, his bald head dripping with sweat.

There was not a fire. He said he needed to reach my mom, claiming she was late on rent. He scolded me and told me to have her call him. Before turning toward the front door, I said I’d let her know, then walked back to my room, pushing the world away from me, my only comfort in that embarrassing moment the touch, smell, and sound of filtered air.

A window unit returns me to the hands of my mother. When I hear the murmurs from one now, I think of her labor that made our window units run, because to experience a window unit is to be confronted by bills and money and working and heat all at once. Unlike central air conditioning, its presence mostly felt, window units call out; they are in the room with us. They have faces and voices. I can feel when they are exhausted.

There is power in going down to Walmart and being able to buy air conditioning in a single transaction. It is liberation to some, who can, for a couple hundred dollars and, at worst, some duct tape, turn a room into a cavern. It is relief in the face of a heat wave. Window units can be ideal in places like small cafes and bars, taking up minimal space in confined areas for maximum comfort. I’ve noticed them cooling the people who sell funnel cakes and crawfish and tacos from trailers and food trucks, aboard boats taking dozens out into the Gulf for snapper fishing, in the cluttered offices of country lawyers. I dream of them on camper trailers parked for a lake weekend, and on work locations deep in the mud. When I’m in the French Quarter, I become fascinated by the appearance of them throughout the mosaic of structures, calling attention to the lives rooted there amid all the history and commotion.

Not only does it blow regulated air in, the window unit removes heat and humidity from a space and circulates it outside, like what central AC does but on a smaller scale. Contrary to popular belief, the window unit is not a backup or alternative — it’s one of last century’s best achievements, in a highly accessible and iconic form.

As of 2020, the South used more air conditioning compared with the country’s other regions, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. While almost 39 million homes in the South used central air conditioning, a little more than 4 million used window or wall units — revealing the greatest disparity of air conditioning equipment in the country. In this way, window units of the South take on an aesthetic of resilience. Though homes across the country have window units, those in the South put in more work, more time out of the year, and are even needed on Christmas sometimes.

I felt this last summer, when I lived in an old building in Dallas between two newer townhome properties with higher rent. The worn-out window unit in the living room could not keep pace with summer temperatures that reached more than 100 degrees, but it held the room just low enough to concentrate. My bedroom, however, was a fortress. I kept the door closed all day as the unit ran on and off. I’d enter, feel my skin adjust, and smile, a sensation I remember from all my childhood summers, walking into a home — or even just a room — and feeling happy in an instant.

The window unit is a matter of the people. In a 1984 paper entitled “The End of the Long Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture,” Raymond Arsenault laid out the history and enduring impact of air conditioning in the region. Though engineers and companies had been developing what we know as air conditioning for more than a century, this relatively young industry had done most of its business cooling factories, banks, offices, theaters, and government buildings because it was expensive and most of the equipment was not practical for residential spaces. There were also moral arguments against it, with some stating that controlling the temperature was against God’s will. 

But in the postwar United States, air conditioning was baked into notions of prosperity and the blueprint for the American home with the help of industry marketing. As Haleema Shah wrote for Smithsonian Magazine, air conditioning was described as “a prewar luxury that was being manufactured in large quantities and sold at a moderate cost in the postwar market.” A 1948 study by Carrier helped the company designate Southerners making more than $10,000 as the likely market for air conditioning since they could afford the steep installation costs (the national median income at the time was $3,200, according to the U.S. Census Bureau). When central air conditioning hit the market, it competed with the window unit among Southerners living in wealthy neighborhoods. Central air became the fulfillment of a promise introduced by the window unit, the promise that Americans could achieve maximum comfort, no matter how hot it got. 

In 1951, an improved and less expensive version of the window unit hit the market. A scaled-down version of that system had become central air conditioning by the end of the decade, but it was people buying window units in the South that proved that in-home cooling could be a practical way forward for business. Sales were so promising that Carrier built window-unit-supplied tract homes in hot, swampy places like Virginia, Louisiana, and Texas in order to continue exploring this rapidly growing market.

By 1955, close to one in 10 Southern homes were air conditioned, nearly double the national rate. By the end of the decade, most new homes were built with central air conditioning, a trend that continues to this day nationwide. The federal government worked alongside industry to standardize air conditioning in homes, with an official from the Federal Housing Authority declaring in 1962, “Within a few years, any house that is not air conditioned will probably be [obsolete].”

The heat is so mean where I grew up that it is almost a joke that any living space would rely solely on window units in the summertime. Though I do have a certain kinship to the beasts, I also remember the feeling that living in places with window units meant you had window units. Like the heat and humidity was ours to bear. Because no matter how chilly a room is, just beyond the reach of the window unit is a wall of heat. It can only do so much.

The landlord from Lake Gladewater enters my adult mind as an apparition. He calls out to me when I am hot in a space, warning of fire as he beats on the walls. It makes me think about some of the places I have lived, both as a kid and an adult, spots where the rent was cheaper and how that often meant bad insulation, windows painted and nailed shut, damaged and aging shingles, and window units just tossed in as if they stood a chance against the sun by themselves.

The South has some of the nation’s highest electric bills, despite having the lowest residential electric billing rates in the country, according to the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance. More than half of homes across the South are older than the country’s earliest energy codes, which set the standard for how efficiently homes are cooled and warmed beginning in the 1970s. So this issue did not arise because of the heat and humidity alone. SEEA attributes the disconnect to housing and infrastructure inequality, recommending that state and federal officials update building codes across the South to improve efficiency and fund programs that support low-income folks’ outfitting their homes, including rentals, for increased energy efficiency.

But no window unit — frankly, no air conditioning technology whatsoever — is going to succeed for the people who need it the most unless the structures around it are taken care of. And it is through this lens that I see a window unit as a potential expression of life that needs help. 

This is especially vital as each summer brings hotter temperatures. Too much research has been published for us to ignore the impact climate change is having on people who are financially impoverished and on people of color. The global race is on to develop an air conditioner model that uses less power and fewer refrigerants but won’t cost people too much. Emissions from AC use are set to raise the planet’s temperature by 0.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, according to the World Economic Fund. Because the basic setup of air conditioning technology has not really changed since it was first introduced, let the window unit also serve as a reminder that we are not that far into this air-conditioned world; that the original intent of this technology was a business motivation and not something meant to save us. Changes must be made.

But for the millions who still use them, we have to designate a humane amount of space for window units to work. They cannot be tasked with regulating too large a space, otherwise nothing will get cooled and electric bills will soar, costing more money to do worse to the environment. As Tom Bender wrote in a 1981 essay, “Air conditioning makes cities hotter, necessitating more air conditioning.”

Window units should carry on their associations with charity drives and continue to be given out during emergency AC drives across the country. They have to be relatively cheap to buy, and reliable, helping people in tight spots. 

Shutting a room’s door and drawing the curtains and blinds creates an incredible intimacy when a window unit is on. The people I care for in one space, sharing, at the very least, relief and protection.

When I see or hear one running, I have to think about the people who are gathered close by it or thinking about how good it will feel to be back in that space. I think of the life inside, despite the heat intensifying around them. I think of my mother, I think of the sounds of the lake, I think of the peace and refuge I found in the mechanical silence.

Dalton LaFerney is a journalist whose writing has appeared in Texas Monthly, D Magazine, and Xtra magazine. He was raised in east Texas and started his career working for newspapers in the Dallas area, Arkansas, and Las Vegas. His writing often explores abuse, survival, and criminal justice.