Hello World! Welcome Friends! Everyone loves summer! Sunny days, warm nights, and outdoor fun. The perfect time of year. But that perfection comes at a price, mostly paid on your utility bill. Yes, some of the enjoyment of summer comes from a cool retreat into your air conditioned house where you can shed the heat of the sun in comfort. Too keep the bite on your wallet to a minimum, try these tricks to stay cool and save.
1.Air
Moving the air in your house can slice your costs dramatically. Moving cool air in and warm air out is one way, but simply moving air at all lets your own body help keep you cool. Moving air over your skin, a breeze, helps this along.
Use Fans: Fans move air around helping create breezes to keep you cool and at a lower cost than actual air conditioning. They can also draw cool air from one part of your house, or outside it, into a warm area, or reverse it and pull warm air out. Consider setting up fans to help draw cool evening or early morning air in and using exhaust fans to pull warm air from kitchens or showers out.
Open Windows: When temperatures drop in the evenings, or before they rise in the morning, open up windows or sliding glass doors to draw that cool air in. Close them again to keep the heat of the day outside.
2.Water
The simple act of drinking something cold can keep your body temperature down, making a slightly higher temperature in your house pleasant. Even more, you can use tricks like misters to help make the air cool.
A bowl of ice in front of a fan is surprisingly effective, but for a real trick, try putting ice packs in your open windows, between the screen and the window, and letting the breeze blow cool air through your house. Put them back in the freezer when you close the windows to get ready for the next day.
3.Fire
The trick here is to keep the fire out of your house. Don’t cook or bake in the house. Using the stove or oven puts a lot of extra heat in the house. Microwave, or fix cold foods, salad for example. Of course, the traditional tactic is to grill outside, keeping the heat out of the house and enjoying the benefits of the weather.
Another source of heat inside the house is lighting. Unfiltered sunlight carries heat into the house, and incandescent lights produce a surprising amount of heat. Switching to compact fluorescent or even LED lighting reduces that heat, while either filtering the light from outside, or only letting in indirect light by shading windows under awnings or other overhangs gives you natural light without the accompanying heat cost or using electricity for artificial light.
4.Earth
An often-overlooked option is going underground. Basements are well insulated and cool even on hot days. Setting up a comfortable area down where it’s cool can let you keep the rest of the house at a slightly higher temperature. Adjusting the thermostat a few degrees can make a big difference in how hard your air conditioner works and how much it costs.
5.Invest
Have you ever heard it costs money to make money? Well, by spending some money on a more efficient air conditioner, you can save money on your utilities. Depending on the age and efficiency of the existing system, this can be a small savings, or a considerable one. Moving to an Energy Star rated system from one that isn’t should gain you at least 15%. Going from a ten-year-old system to a new one is usually a 30% gain. How much that translates to in dollars depends on a lot of factors. How big your house is, whether you are using a central air system or one in each room, how high the temperatures go in your region and how long they stay there. Check with local resources to get estimates on both cost and savings.
Another investment you can make is shade. One obvious choice is trees. Putting in 15 to 20-foot-high trees will give your house immediate shade, keeping the sun’s heat from reaching it. A simpler step is to close curtains. Sunlight passes through windows, carrying energy to heat your house inside. Curtains stop it from getting very far. More proactive are covers on the outside of your windows. Some are specially designed to let light through while blocking heat. Just be sure you don’t have to make up for the blocked sunlight by spending money on extra artificial light. And remember there are health benefits to real sunlight, so don’t avoid it completely.
So with just a few simple tricks, you can enjoy the warm summer days and not spend a fortune keeping your house cool and pleasant. The best of both worlds!
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Toodles,
These are useful information, thank you.
Thanks for stopping by, Vania!
These are great tips, As i know so many people forget about the direction their ceiling fan spins.
Thank you so much for these tips! I believe I’ll use some of them. I didn’t have an air conditioner in my house until last summer. How I even could live without it, I have no idea. But now the conditioner makes my life so much easier. At least now I can really work on my things not just sit on the couch and hope that in the evening I’ll have some energy to do something useful. But of course, everything comes with a price. And in this case, it’s utility bill.
By the way, your tip to don’t cook or bake in the house is the best. At least I’ve found it very useful although I tried not to cook on those hot days (I even didn’t want to). And another cool way is just to keep your curtains closed so the sun wouldn’t come in and heat the room even more.
And yep, if you use one of the newest air conditioners you can be pretty sure that you’ll save some money on your utilities, at least in long term. I’m using different air conditioners in different rooms, not a central air conditioner. And I must say I’m pretty satisfied although I believe when I’ll use your tricks, I’ll save more money.