Record 87-Degree Forecast Empties Hardware Stores Of Window AC Units By Thursday Noon

WAUKESHA — The last 5,000-BTU window air conditioner at Reif's Ace Hardware on East Sunset Drive sold at 11:42 a.m. Thursday to a woman who, according to a cashier, specifically drove over from the Oconomowoc side of the county because her own hardware store had sold out two hours earlier.

Saturday's forecast calls for a high of 87 degrees, which the National Weather Service says would be the warmest October 12 in Waukesha's recorded history, surpassing a mark of 84 set in 1963. The current record has stood long enough that nobody at either hardware store Thursday could say who, if anyone, had been alive to feel the previous one.

By Thursday afternoon, Reif's had sold 61 air conditioning units in four days, more than the store typically moves in the second half of June. A second location on Moreland Boulevard sold its last box fan, a 20-inch model normally priced to move in late August clearance bins, at 2:15 p.m.

A supply run with October math

Store manager Russ Teigland, 54, said the rush caught Reif's mid-changeover, with the autumn merchandise, rakes, bags of leaf mulch, a small pyramid of birdseed, already occupying the floor space where the air conditioners had been stocked through September.

"We had the rakes out and the units in the back room, and by Wednesday afternoon I had customers asking me to go get units out of the back room like it was July 4th weekend. I haven't restocked an AC order in October in the nineteen years I've worked here."

— Russ Teigland, hardware store manager, 54

Teigland said he placed an emergency reorder Wednesday night with a distributor who told him the earliest delivery window was the following Tuesday, four days after the heat is expected to have broken. He has not canceled the order.

City opens three cooling shelters

The city's Department of Public Works announced Thursday that cooling shelters will be open Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the downtown library, Waukesha North High School's gymnasium, and the Frame Park recreation center, each stocked with bottled water and, per a department memo, "a reasonable number of box fans, contingent on availability."

Assistant public works coordinator Lauren Hribar, 39, said the shelters were originally built into the city's emergency plan for summer heat waves and had never before been activated in October.

"The plan says 'activate when conditions warrant.' Nobody wrote a line in there about what to do if it warrants in October, so we're doing the summer version of it in autumn clothes, basically."

— Lauren Hribar, assistant public works coordinator, 39

Thermostat debates reach the Nextdoor app

On neighborhood social app Nextdoor, a thread titled "Is it crazy to run AC the weekend before Halloween??" had accumulated 118 replies by Thursday evening, split roughly between residents who said they'd already pulled their window units back out of storage and residents who said they refused on principle to run air conditioning in the same week their porch pumpkins were out.

Backslide Way resident Ned England, whose YouTube channel Nedsmokedout tracks air quality from the Frame Park pedestrian bridge by counting visible lampposts, said he counted only six of the usual nine Thursday evening, which he attributed to "heat shimmer, not smoke," and noted in his video description that he would not be adjusting his methodology for the warm snap.

Forecasters expect temperatures to drop back into the low 60s by Wednesday, a swing of roughly 25 degrees that Teigland said he's already bracing for from the other direction.

"By next weekend I'll have people in here buying space heaters off the same shelf. I might just leave the shelf sign blank and write the number in with marker."

— Russ Teigland, hardware store manager, 54