Phoenix winters are not one bit like Uruguay

Well, on the face of it that would sound like a perfectly obvious statement. Tonight it SORT OF felt like early Winter in UY. We've had quite a bit of rain lately so the humidity is way higher than normal - but for just a moment there was a waft of woodsmoke smell in the air that was vaguely like Eucalyptus. Just for a moment though.

But no, not really. Probably one fireplace out of the hundreds in the area had something vaguely Eucalyptus scented burning in it - but on balance it just smelled sort of like a house fire. Nothing like that going on anywhere near here so its probably the creosote-product-type things people burn in their fireplaces. It's a log shaped roll packet but that's where its similarity ends. You're not even supposed to open it - if you did you'd probably see that you'd bought some tightly-rolled old newspaper impregnated with sticky coal tar.

Actual wood is DAMN expensive. So on balance there was really quite a STENCH in the air from all the fake logs being burned up. It was about 8:30 pm, which is usually when I do grocery shopping or cook dinner - but most couples would have long since finished with dinner, put the kid(s) to bed and lit the foul-smelling thing in their fireplace.

Fireplaces here are definitely more decorative than functional. Most of them cause a net EXIT of heat from the house making it MORE expensive to heat with the furnace already installed. There are gas fireplaces but I don't know of anyone who uses theirs. It's essentially a burner of natural gas with a fake "log" insert that makes it look like a smoldering fireplace. The log insert puts out very little in the way of heat. They're a great way to have a zero-maintenance fireplace that you can literally turn on with a wall switch - but you get a huge gas bill.

Yes, heat IS necessary out here in the desert. The most common is a natural gas furnace that's integrated with your air conditioning. Heat pumps are common too (i.e. an A/C unit that can be reversed and provides heat into the house) because this far south they're economical to run. They're certainly not the split system things like I had in Uruguay - that type of air conditioner really never caught on here. They're available but NOT from mainstream stores and generally EXTREMELY high priced.

Indoor propane heaters - the style with a tank in the back and two or three ceramic burners - are unknown here. I'm sure our "nanny state" forbids them. The tanks are readily available for gas grills but the heater unit, I've never seen. It'd probably be more likely to tip over on a carpeted floor. I saw them for sale in Mexico earlier this week - although the asking prices for just about any appliance there are pretty high compared to what I saw in Uruguay for the same item.