Air Conditioning in the Home

To enjoy a comfortable climate indoors is an important part of life. That's because your home is where you spend a lot of your time.

A good quality air conditioning system forms a major part of that comfort, making a living space where you can relax and feel safe and cozy with your family when you're not at work.

Depending on whereabouts you live, whatever the weather is outside should not impact too much on how you feel inside your home. So if you live in a place that enjoys hot summers, it makes sense to ensure your home will feel cool enough to be comfortable any the time of day or night.

Temperature Maintenance

The entire reason for installing an efficient, sufficiently powered AC system at home is so you can enjoy a temperate climate indoors even if the sun is searing hot outside during the day, or if the nights are hot and sticky. The general idea is about maintaining an even temperature throughout the year, which makes good sense when you think about it.

A lot of folks make the costly mistake of setting their thermostat far too low in summer. Then their home feels like it's at the north pole rather than in the comfortable temperate zone. That just wastes expensive energy in spades and contributes to a massive utility bill to deal with at the end of the summer!

The sensible way to approach AC is to set the thermostat to a real comfortable level that you can relax with indoors when it's real hot outside, but not feel you need to put on a sweater because you can see your breath when you exhale. The exact setting will be down to personal preference, but somewhere in the low 70s is about right for most folks.

Energy Consumption

A lot of folks worry about even having AC installed in their homes because they fear the high energy bills they think they're going to be faced with. Sure, it costs some to run an AC, but not as much as you think as long as you are sensible when using it.

As already mentioned above, as long as you don't set the thermostat too low, you can enjoy a nice even climate indoors without the system having to work very hard or use so much electricity to maintain it. If you have individual room units fitted for example, you can shut off the ones in the rooms that are not occupied to save energy.

The major downside to running an air conditioning system is the amount of energy it consumes to provide that comfortable atmosphere internally. Generally speaking, the larger the system and the larger the building that needs to be cooled, the more energy will be used to achieve its end.

In days gone by, when energy was cheaper, this wasn’t so much of a problem. But nowadays where energy costs have soared and continue to rise, it is wise to employ some economy measures to reduce the amount of power consumed by the cooling system.

Obviously, it would be foolish to try to create a very cold indoor temperature as this would cause the AC to work very hard to maintain the lower temperature, thereby using far more energy as a consequence.

Watch the Thermostat

A lot of the time, people are surprisingly unaware of what their thermostat is set to. If more people took more notice of this one simple thing, they could save themselves a big chunk off their energy bills.

At the same time they could be saving a huge amount of wastage that is environmentally damaging and ecologically unsound.

How is this?

Simple. If the thermostat is set too low, you may be enjoying a really cool Arctic climate in your living room, but your poor AC system is working like crazy to keep it that cold. All that extra work costs energy to make it happen and that converts into higher energy bills because you wasted so much electricity.

The sensible homeowner will be acutely aware of their household budget and finances. They will see the blatantly obvious place to save a lot of dollars off each quarterly bill.

By turning the thermostat to a sensible temperature, such as around 75 degrees or thereabouts, the AC system doesn’t need to work as hard. Therefore it uses less energy to achieve a still comfortable temperature.

Many people erroneously believe that you need to set the temperature really low to get the house cool. But all this achieves is a "too cold" house and you have to put on a sweater to feel comfortable.

That, in summer, is crazy!

A Light Bulb Moment

If you think 75 is too warm, just do this little mental exercise. I promise it won’t hurt:

Cast your mind back to winter. You know, when it was darn cold outside and you couldn’t wait to come home to a nice warm environment where you could take off your big coat and thick sweater and relax in the warmth.

Whoa... wait a sec!

What was the thermostat set to back then?

My guess is if you had it much higher than 75, it was too hot, right? But lower than, say 72 was too cold. Well, if 75 was comfortable in winter, it can also be comfortable in summer, can’t it?

That, my friend is how to use your AC sensibly and it not cost you the earth to run it every summer!

Why Do You Need Air Conditioning?

In the home, air conditioning is an essential system to keep the interior and thereby its occupants at a comfortable temperature during the hot summer months.

Different homes have different cooling systems of varying sizes and outputs installed, while some have none at all.

Keeping the home cool enough to be comfortable when it’s searing hot outside is a considerable task for a cooling system. However, most systems appear adequately able to cope with the task at hand rather well as long as such system is sized correctly for the building it occupies.

You will need some kind of artificial cooling solution if it gets hot in your area for part of the year, just like you need heating if it gets cold in winter.

You could argue that you can always cool off with a cold shower and use a regular fan on the hot days, but is that really comfortable for you?

Chances are it's not really a working solution that you'd be real happy with.

Then there's the hot nights when sleeping can be difficult or you can't have a fan running because the draft it creates gives you stiff joints or rheumatism.

For the relatively moderate outlay to purchase and install an AC system in your home, it is money well spent for that comfort you can enjoy in your home for years to come.

More Information

There is more information on air conditioners and which are the best choices for certain installations that you can find by clicking the link below:

AirConergy

Alternatively, you can scan the QR code on the right to visit the Airconergy.com website via your phone or tablet if you wish.

I might as well also include some helpful external resources that might add some additional learning capacity to this page.

Air Conditioning Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_conditioning
How America became addicted to air conditioning: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/oct/26/how-america-became-addicted-to-air-conditioning
Study Heating/Refrigeration/Air conditioning in the USA: https://www.studyusa.com/en/field-of-study/519/heating-refrigeration-air-conditioning
Air Conditioning energy.gov: https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/home-cooling-systems/air-conditioning
Central Air Conditioning: https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/central-air-conditioning
History of Air Conditioning: https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-air-conditioning
Contribution of air conditioning adoption to future energy use under global warming: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4434761/
Ironically, air conditioning could be the thing fueling future global warming: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/05/20/air-conditioning-environment-statistics/27586469/
How air conditioning changed the world: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39735802
Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS): https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/reports/2009/air-conditioning.php
NASA: The influence of air-conditioning on street temperatures in the city of Paris: https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/505252main_demunck.pdf
Central Air Conditioning (CAC): https://www.energystar.gov/about/federal_tax_credits/central_air_conditioning
Air conditioning accounts for about 12% of U.S. home energy expenditures: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36692

They’re all related to the subject with varying target topics that provide a wider learning experience and basically are there to kind of centralize all the information right here.

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