Cold weather in LA
You may have heard people in LA complaining on social media about how fucking annoying winters are in this city. The weather gets down into the 50s at night, but none of the buildings have insulation of any kind... so it's colder indoors in LA than it is indoors in New England. I've spent winters/early spring seasons in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, and all the places I lived in those states had generally warmer interiors in cold weather than Los Angeles did!
It's legally required for a residence in LA to have heating... but not required for it to have air conditioning. So you can presumably run the heat in your LA house, but it'll lose the heat extremely fast without insulation to keep it inside. It's also very common for people living in older apartments to have nonfunctional heating that they don't learn about or care about until it's already winter.
I once even lived in a place with jalousie windows on every single window in the apartment, which did not seal airtight between each pane of glass, so whenever I ran a space heater in my room it would lose the heat immediately. Even if we'd ran our apartment heating system constantly, it wouldn't have made much of a difference. I had to go to sleep in that apartment wearing multiple layers. I had a routine for wrapping myself up in blankets systematically to keep myself from waking up cold in the middle of the night!
Anyway, if you're going to move here ever:
- Make sure the windows close and are airtight
- Make sure your heating system is the kind of thing that you can leave off all year and then turn on with 100% confidence the first night it gets chilly. I lived in a place with an ancient gas heater once and we needed a guy to come light the pilot light every winter.
- Bring your space heater. You will need it. I've used space heaters more here than any other place I've ever lived, including New Hampshire.
I can't wait for it to get warm here again!