Our house was built in 1963. Solid brick walls, 16 inch thick, make for exceptional insulation year around. Sound doesn’t travel through those walls. The house was equipped with new double-pane uPVC windows in the late 90’s to keep wind and noise out and warmth in. The big focus with construction in Germany is on cold winters and how to keep heating cost low. Climate is changing, though. Winters haven’t been as cold lately. Summers, however, are getting hotter.
This year Germany saw the hottest day ever – so far. Möckern-Drewitz reached 41.8°C (107.24°F) on Saturday, June 27th, at 4:37 p.m.
Where I live we didn’t have it quite as bad – still a full week over 90°F is very unusual. Our house kept its cool for the most part. The basement is lovely, never climbed over 74°F. The first floor wasn’t too bad either, sporting around 77°F. The second floor hovered around 80°F during the day. The third floor, right under the roof, has always been the problem area, though. We’ve made all kinds of adjustments over the years to manage the heat, but there’s only so much you can do. It’s really hard to get a good night’s sleep when the bedroom sits at 83°F.
Just get an air-conditioner, you’d say. Well, that’s not so easy, given the architecture of our house – or any house in Germany for that matter. A simple split unit would require breaking through brick walls. Expensive and time consuming to do. The window air-conditioners available in the US wouldn’t work with the ingenious windows that are standard in Germany. There are monoblock air conditioners available and reasonably priced – but they all pose one main problem: what to do with the exhaust hose?
The “solution” offered by sellers of these mobile AC units is usually some extremely crappy looking, more or less leaky, make-shift contraption that allows you to create a flexible seal around an opened window and feed the hose through that.
I hesitated to succumb to this for over five years. Until now. With some help from AI I finally found a stylish looking, very practical solution for the hose problem. There’s a company MückeNix Fenstereinsätze that makes custom-fit acrylic glass “climate windows” with a cut-out for the exhaust hose. They simply clip into the window frame, like a screen. All I had to do was measure correctly and wait for a week.
Our De’Longhi Pinguino PAC EX105 mobile air conditioner now blows hot air out through the exhaust hose without the possibility of sucking it right back in through that open window. Detach the hose and the window will still close like normal. Our bedroom is back to being a relaxing, cool place. Climate change has lost its edge, for now. 
