Carry Large Objects This Way

October arrives and we need to pack away the window air conditioners into the cellar – a dreaded biannual task, that gets harder as the years creep up on lumbar disks and arthritic knees.

Our downstairs air conditioners weigh a lot, e.g., this LG 12,000 BTU unit…

… weighs 81 lbs. Our new Medea 12,000 BTU weighs 59 lbs. These are heavy. I had been devising ways to make it easier to lug them up and down from the cellar. One method involved setting up a sliding ramp over the cellar stairs…

Looking down cellar stairs with long white board as ramp overlaid.

And then using furniture dollies to move the items across the floors to the proper spot.

These helped but seemed just too convoluted and involved and I wanted a way that reduced back strain AND allowed flexible mobility with the load, the AC.

I was particularly concerned about lower back injury, disk strain and I remembered clearly the guidelines from a great book on how to avoid back pain. Jack R Tessman a professor of Physics at Tufts University, hurt his back badly on a vacation on Cape Cod and then had to lift boxes and objects to make way for the next tenants a couple of days later. He figured a way how.

First he diagnosed the problem: too much pressure on the lumbar hinge joints when one tries to lift an object from a forward lean. As a physicist he described our back lifting as a crane:

As you can see lifting a box from the front places incredible pressure on that lumbar area. In fact 500% more pressure then just standing!!!

But Mr. Tessman came up with a solution! Carry things never in the front but rather behind you.

I figured someone must have come up with a means to turn heavy objects into back packs… or provided some means to lift them on your back with straps. And sure enough, they did. I found this on the Internet

Wish.com offered exactly that for less than $50. I ordered it immediately. (Wish.com is a platform that nearly exclusively sells goods produced in China for rock-bottom prices.)

And it works just like described: