A few of our air conditioners were stolen

My wife and I run a small business of renting beachside bungalows to tourists.

  • It is seasonal work, as you might imagine, with 6 months of heavy business followed by six months of almost no business at all.

During the busy season we both stay booked constantly. My wife handles the bookings and the paperwork, while I am the handyman and make sure all of our properties stay in tip-top condition. Last summer was our eighth year in business, and our busiest season to date! There were a lot of issues, though, including a rash of air conditioner thefts that cost us a lot of money. You know how in major hotels the rooms all have giant air conditioners built right into the walls? Those are very expensive, but worth it because they are the best for cooling down a small space, and they are almost impossible to steal. In our beachside bungalows the walls are too thin, and the power grid too weak, to support all of those HVAC units. Instead we use the small, portable air conditioners that you can mount in a window using simple brackets. These are low in cost and provide adequate cooling for the guests, so everybody wins! Recently we learned the major downside of these A/C units, that being how small they are makes them very easy to steal. It is not our guests stealing the air conditioners, of course, it is people stealing the units from the outside. Being mounted in the window sill means that the air conditioners are exposed to the outside, and easy to rip off the brackets.
cooling