Getting Air Conditioners and Making a Cardboard Playhouse

Yesterday, for the first time in our married lives, we got air conditioners for our home. Growing up, we actually never had air conditioners, but just used fans, and were totally fine. A year or two before we moved away from Northeast Ohio, my parents installed central air conditioning in our house to increase its market value.
Then we moved abroad, and again, no air conditioning.

This September, we'll have been married 11 years, and we've never had "real" air conditioning in our house. We started off using fans when necessary, and trying to avoid using fans when those weren't necessary, to keep down our electric bills. One summer we were just so miserably hot that we bought a portable second hand air conditioner for our bedroom (we were co-sleeping at the time, so it was for the entire family). It stood up on the floor, connected to one of the windows with a pipe, and worked... sort of. During times when the fan blowing on you simply felt like a car exhaust blowing on you, this portable air conditioning unit was a welcome relief even if it didn't actually make you comfortable, but it did a terrible job of actually cooling down the room. It just made it marginally better. And we didn't have any air conditioning in the living room/dining room/kitchen. The portable unit we had was barely strong enough for our small bedroom, let alone the bigger living room/dining room/kitchen. And the children's room was built in such a way that we couldn't put any air conditioning there.
So essentially, no AC in our place.
In the winter, we used blow heaters and radiators and halogen heaters...

Yesterday we finally bought real air conditioning units that double as heaters (I think they are called split system heat pumps). The same unit warms the place in the winter as cools it in the summer. It is supposed to be the most cost efficient way to heat your home here. When we designed the layout of our new home, we had them build it with preparations already there for the air conditioning units, so we wouldn't have a large expense to install them (places for pipes and electricity).
But we spent most of the winter here without those units, since I didn't get around to ordering and installing them.

Finally on a price comparison website I found some decent pricing for these AC units. One large one for the living room/dining room/kitchen, and one small one for my bedroom. The kids' room is right near the living room/dining room and should be able to be cooled or heated from the adjacent room, but if not, we may also put the portable AC unit in there. We also put an air conditioning unit in our rental unit's living room. (They brought and installed AC units from their old home into two of the bedrooms.)


Doing our research, we learned about inverter vs regular air conditioning units, and that inverter air conditioners generally cost a lot more to buy, but tend to be cheaper to run (depending on how you use them, but especially if you use them for long periods of time- I think), as well as quieter. The original price quotes we got for inverter ACs were so much more expensive, but I managed to find an inverter unit for just $100 more than a non inverter for the size we needed. We decided to get that inverter in our living room/dining room, since that would be on more regularly, so it is most worth it for that to be more inexpensive to run. Since our tenants are paying for their own electricity, we decided to not invest in an inverter one for them. And because our bedroom is small and shouldn't take a lot of energy to cool or heat, we went with the non inverter there as well.

We didn't buy top of the line brands for our units, but spoke with a professional who advised us, and bought ones that have a decent reputation even though they are cheaper. Ours have warranties for quite a few years so even if anything happens, we're good.

Yesterday they were finally installed- we asked around and found a guy who does quality work inexpensively, and he installed all three for the same price as another guy was charging to install one unit. Added bonus- he was such a pleasant guy, happily taking the time to explain to my kids what he was doing as he was doing it.

The cool thing that I discovered about these units only after they were installed already was that they connect to the wifi in the house, so we can turn them on or off no matter where we are; if we accidentally leave it on when we leave the house, we can turn them off from our phones, and if we want the house to be a pleasant temperature when we come home, we can turn it on a little in advance. Hopefully this will make our electric bill a little lower since we won't have it on more than necessary.

The challenge now will be to not take advantage of these units all the time, and not use them just because they are there, because I don't want sky high air electric bills.

After the units were installed, we were left with 6 really large boxes (each unit came with an internal and external unit), and I wanted to take advantage of those boxes to make play things. It doesn't matter how many nice toys kids have; for some reason they just really tend to enjoy playing with cardboard boxes.

I used scissors to cut open the boxes, and tape to attach them together, and made my children a playhouse out of the boxes.

Already they've had hours of fun playing in there.

I love it.

I don't know how long we'll actually keep the box playhouse out there, as it is, by no means, strong enough to last a while... but for now it's there, and when they're done, into the trash it'll go.

Do you have air conditioning in your house? What type? If you bought air conditioning units after a long time of not having them, how drastically, if at all, did you see your utilities bills increase?
Do your kids also like to play with cardboard boxes?