A $50,000 electric bill? The cost of cooling L.A.’s biggest houses in a heat wave that’s expected to break all recent records over the next five days and nights? We already heard this kind of thing before, and the answer is: the same kind of response we heard when the temperature climbed above 107 degrees on Aug. 8 last year was the same.
The people in this story know it’s a hot day when they open their windows and go outside. They know when things stop cool, and they know when the air conditioning is on, because there’s a light on in the garage where it’s been keeping the house cool.
But they don’t know what they’re letting themselves in for. They haven’t seen the temperature in their living rooms above 118 degrees. That’s where the heat wave hits, and they still don’t know if the air conditioner is on or off.
“It’s like a roller coaster,” said Robert Chonko, who lives in one of those houses.
“It’s just a roller coaster,” says his wife, Tami. “It’s like riding a roller coaster.”
So far, the roller coaster is going so fast even they don’t know how it’s running, and as they say, what comes around, comes around.
“I saw a picture of a car, and it looked like a convertible,” said Chonko, a professional landscaper. “Now you see it is a car, a convertible.”
What’s a convertible doing in an “all-terrain” hot house? A hot house is a home in which people live and work in the same place, and in which they sleep in a separate bedroom. It’s a typical home in the suburbs, with four bedrooms, two bathrooms, two living rooms, a kitchen, a family room and a basement. It’s also called living in a two-story home.
“The whole thing is a lot of fun,” said Chonko, a resident of the 807-acre estate called Calabasas, which includes the home he lives in and a two-bedroom duplex.
Now we know what it feels like to live a roller coaster and what it looks like to see a car that has become a convertible, because a lot of people here are seeing signs of the heat wave that’s beginning, and it’s going to be