Efficient cooling
By Karina | July 14, 2008
We’re having thermostat wars at work. OK, it’s not anything openly declared, but there is a silent creep in conflicting directions… someone keeps sneaking the temperature down, and someone keeps sneaking it up. Couple that with an inaccurate thermostat system in our building when I walk from my end of the office down to the kitchen, I can go from microclimate to microclimate.
At home, of course, where we’re not subject to the vagaries of our rented office spaces, we have more control. Y’all know by now that I don’t have an air conditioner at my house. But I think of all of you when I get emails from my power company telling me how to save energy in the summer!
As the temperature rises, thoughts of those high summer cooling bills put many homeowners into a cold sweat. After all, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that summer air-conditioning accounts for more than 16 percent of annual energy spending in the average home. As we get ready to head into summer, there are some low cost steps that you can take to help keep your home comfortable and to help lower your energy bills.
There are a lot of great tips here to check out - here are just a couple to keep in mind, and these are some that I use too, even in my air conditionerless home.
On warm, sunny days, keep window coverings closed to prevent solar heat gain.Use ceiling or room fans in occupied rooms. These will get air moving and help to reduce the temperature.
and here’s one that is so important, but which is often easy to overlook.
Make sure your thermostat is not located near lamps or electronic appliances. It can sense heat from these devices and make your air-conditioner run longer.
Do you have any tips for staying cool with or without an A/C, and while saving lots of energy?
Photo from flickr user bondidwhat via creative commons license.
Topics: Home |
Homemade icepops! They cool my sweaty self down, and make me happy. And they’re not a burden on the summertime grid, so I can have as many as I want!
you can almost argue that by making ice pops you keep your freezer working MORE efficiently b/c it’s more full of stuff!
cook outside! i’m not sure on the energy savings but cooking out on the grill keeps all that extra cooking heat from accumulating in the kitchen.
Take a cool shower.
I work from home in the summer, and I just stay in my underwear all day–it helps in our very hot apt (we keep our AC set to 82), and it means less laundry to wash, as well.
When it’s really bad, I take a bandanna and soak it in cold water, wring it out, and tie it around my neck. That helps a lot, too.
Here in St. Louis, the humidity will drive a person insane. Example: my orchids thrive on the covered porch because they think they’re back in the Amazon.
We have a small fan pointed at our thermostat to make it (thermostat) think it’s cooler than it really is. We keep it set at 78 (when I’m home alone) and 77 (when hot box husband is home). This was Husband’s idea, and now that I think about it, I don’t know if it’s useful. Couldn’t I just set the thermostat higher?
Also, I made curtains out of white duckcloth. It’s heavy enough to keep heat out of the room, but also light enough so I don’t feel like I’m in a coffin.
Our basement is always nice and cool, so I’m working on making it a nicer place to hang out!
duckcloth curtains are a great idea!
This thermostat thing baffles me. Does everyone in the world but my family have central air? If so, why?! We have window air conditioners. Only the rooms that are being used are cooled. I especially like this because I am much more sensitive to cold than the rest of my family, and can hole up in my room with the air conditioner off or on low while the rest of them have it on cold downstairs… Anyway, I’m sure this is more energy efficient than cooling the whole house all the time.
actually, my parents have central air, but the vents in all the rooms have little dials that can be used to close them–sort of like the ones in a car. problem solved!
We use a swamp cooler in our apartment. Basically, its a big fan with a pan of water under it and it fans the top of water making our apartment feel much cooler. You can even add ice to the water pan and it makes it even chillier.
swamp coolers are so neat! it’s so humid in NJ that I’m not sure it would work for me, though. And I”m a royal klutz, and would probably knock them over.
I sleep with a ceiling fan on. With the air moving it makes it feel much cooler, plus it help ward off the hot flashes! :-)
Last year we also re-insulated our attic space to double what it should have been, and that has helped a great deal. The year before that we replaced all our windows to the ones with low-e glazing to keep out the heat.
I LOVE ceiling fans. I know they’re not considered cool by interior designers, but they are SO effective.
was your attic insulated before? as in, do you have a before (regular insulation)/after (super insulation) comparison?
[…] Efficient cooling […]
Our house is a Cape (peaked 2nd floor ceilings) and when we moved in it had the insulation on the roof rafters in teh crawlspace instead of on the exterior side of the interior walls which meant worse ventilation and insulating the wrong area (it insulated the crawl spaces instead of just the rooms - not to mention creatinga moisture issue against the underside of the roof. Correcting that was simple and cheap (new insulation for a relatively small area) and has had a great impact on stabilizing the temperature of the second floor, which also helps regulate the main floor.
Small task, Big effect. Not that it doesn’t get hot up there in summer, but instead of trapping the heat, it now naturally vents out the cobra vents along the roof peak and the max temperature of the 2nd floor is easily 10 degrees lower.
[…] Efficient cooling […]
I sleep with a ceiling fan on, and try to wear the least amount of clothes possible. I think it’s easier to adjust if you don’t really go into many air conditioned places, you don’t really know how hot it is.