Like many on PEI have already done, we are having a heat pump installed next week. My mother has a 900 square foot apartment at the end of our house, and we want the unit for the air conditioning feature in the summer. It’s something we’ve resisted, mostly because we’ve never needed air conditioning here in the past and it seemed like an environmentally-unfriendly extravagance, but the heat and humidity we experience regularly in the summer now takes its toll on her at age 101 and it’s time to give in.

I was hoping the installation would have been done earlier in the year, but backordered units and a busy installer (I have learned to beware the tradesperson who is quickly available!) delayed things, so I hauled out a portable air conditioning unit today to give my mother some comfort in this latest heat wave.

I bought the a/c unit a year ago when my mother started to feel unwell during another heat wave (there are so many now). In my haste to help her to feel better, I didn’t do much research before buying and then realised when I got the unit home that the crank-out casement windows we have were a problem as the insert to hook the exhaust hose to the window were made for hung or sliding windows only. There are lots of janky looking contraptions available online to solve this problem, but I needed some way to hook it up quickly.

My first attempt, a panicked corrugated-cardboard/dollar-store-duct-tape affair, collapsed in the middle of the night and allowed swarms of insects into her bathroom, so I searched for a better solution. I found a few hacks using a piece of plexiglass to fit the window opening and cutting a hole for the hose, but I know from experience that plexiglass can be tricky to cut, especially a circle, and it’s expensive to experiment on, so that was out.

Then I thought of corrugated plastic sheets, the same stuff that is used for signs and packaging. The closest place that had any in stock was Home Depot in Charlottetown, so I ordered for pickup two of the thickest pieces they had (two in case I screwed up the first one!) and some good quality duct tape. I bundled my mother into the car for the 200 km roundtrip to give her both an outing and the benefit of the a/c in the car, a nice salesperson brought the goods out to us, and we boomeranged home so I could hack away.

I was surprised by how well my setup worked last summer. It isn’t a pretty solution, but was sturdy, relatively inexpensive and reusable. Most importantly, my mother felt better as the humidity in her apartment decreased.

Here are my tips if you find yourself in the same casement window conundrum:

• Cut the plastic sheet a couple of millimetres larger than your window opening. You can pare it down to make it fit tightly, but you can’t add onto it if it’s too small, and unless you have perfect measuring and cutting skills, the plastic is tricky to cut exactly straight, and windows aren’t always perfectly straight either.
• Once I had the plastic sheet fitted snugly in the window, I removed it and used the insert as a template to draw a hole at the bottom for the duct to vent through. The plastic is easy to cut, but take your time and use the smallest knife blade you have, like a #2 exacto.
• I put the plastic sheet back in the window and then placed the window insert in front, and the hose hooked to that. At first I thought I could just insert the hose to the plastic sheet, but the hose is heavy and I feared the weight of it could pull the sheet away from the window. There was no way to keep the loosely-fitting insert in place without taping it to the window frame on the right side of my setup and the plastic sheet on the left, so that’s what I did.
• As added support, I used a spring-loaded curtain rod to add additional support to keep the plastic sheet in place as it bowed out a bit in the heat. If I had been able to get thicker plastic, this might not have been necessary, and I’m starting this year without putting it up.
• Although the plastic sheet was tight enough to stay in place on its own, I finished the setup by running duct tape around the entire window to both keep the sheet and insert in place and keep insects out.
• The duct tape I used was made by 3M and though it was sticky enough to stay on all summer, it came off quite cleanly, with only a bit of cleanup. No insects came in, which is a miracle in our mosquito-filled location. Good quality duct tape is worth the extra money.
• It took me an hour or so to get this fitted for the first time last year, but this year I had everything up and running in about 10 minutes.

I am unhappy we need air conditioning at all, and am conflicted by having to use precious resources such as electricity and plastics and metals in this way. It seems a step backward, and I’m thinking what I can do to make up for this. The heat pump is supposed to be more efficient to run than the portable air conditioner, and will also provide heat in colder months that will make us less dependent on heating oil. Swings and roundabouts.