Reducing AC Running Costs
There are a number of ways to reduce the cost of running an air conditioner. Some are intuitive and make simple sense, others you may not have thought of right away.
Here's the obvious one:
Set the thermostat to a sensible level. Sure it's tempting to set it down to around 68°F so that when you come in from working in the yard, mowing the lawn or doing some heavy work around the exterior of the house, you really feel that blast of icy air to cool you down!
However, that initial cooling, great as it feels, soon loses its appeal when you're sitting down for a while and you notice you're actually feeling cold! What do most people do in this situation?
Do they turn up the thermostat?
Nope, they grab a warm sweater or robe to put on so they feel warm again. That may be convenient and easy, but all the while the AC is humming away using a load of excess electricity to keep it cold in there.
If you want to reduce your electricity costs, you really need to let the AC work less. Turning up the thermostat to, say, 72-74°F will certainly achieve that. The AC doesn't need to work so hard to maintain that temperature and the knock-on effect is a more agreeable electricity bill when it arrives!
Another pretty obvious way to keep costs down is to make sure your place is properly insulated. The main areas are the attic and walls, although there is often a lot of heat escape or ingress through single pane windows and ill-fitting doors.
Insulation is a whole topic all to itself and a pretty big one at that. To keep this opening page short enough and to the point, I'll leave that to its own page.
Here's a not-so-obvious one:
Stop your house heating up so much. How does that happen? When the walls of the house are getting direct rays from the sun during the hottest parts of the day, especially brickwork or masonry, they'll heat up a lot and hold that heat for a long time.
Wood panel walls don't heat up so much or hold heat, but they do let more heat through as they don't have the same thermal mass as masonry and bricks. That takes us back to getting them insulated.
The best way to prevent walls from heating up is to stop the sun's rays from reaching them as far as possible. Shading is the best solution here as it can be cheap and effective.
Shade trees or tall shrubs work very well to shade east- and west-facing walls from the hot late-morning and afternoon sun. If you don't have trees or shrubs, awnings make a good alternative.
A roof overhang on the south-facing wall can keep the sun off that one all day, since the sun's angle in the sky is very high or even directly overhead during summer. The roof overhand will cast a shadow wide enough to keep the south wall in shade.
That's enough for the home page of this site. I've provided more information on certain aspects of air conditioning and cooling the home on additional pages attached to this site. You'll see the titles in the navigation bar at the top of the page.
You might want to take a look at a cooling air conditioners video below:
