I really thought I was in trouble last summer when my central heating and air conditioning system blew out right in the middle of the biggest heatwave my area had seen in decades! The heating and cooling repair company was not available to come out for emergency HVAC service due to everyone having heat and cooling system break downs at the same time.
I thought I was going to have to go to a hotel for a few days and blow hundreds of bucks just to have quality air conditioning and survive.
But then I thought about the old days when I had a window air conditioning system and remembered that I still had that window air conditioning system in my garage! It was in full working order and I never got rid of it. I went to the garage and pulled it out. Then I installed it into the front window of my living room and got air conditioning pumping through the one area of my home. Thinking old school pretty much saved me hundreds of bucks! The only drawback was that I had to live in my living room and even sleep there. Because I only had 1 window air conditioning unit from back when. This was fine with me. It was survival, it worked great and it saved me several hundred bucks and missing time from my job. I could carry on with life business as usual until the local heating and cooling company could get out to fix my central HVAC unit in a few days after that.