Operating Your Home: Cooling
Through these warmer months, it’s crucial that we keep our homes cool to maintain our collective comfort and health.
With that in mind, we’ve put together a helpful guide outlining how you can efficiently cool your home, to not only reduce your costs, but also reduce your carbon footprint.
First things first, you need to keep the heat out!
Step One: Limit ambient heat transfer by closing all your windows and doors when it is hotter outside than in.
Step Two: Block out the sun by using any external blinds or shading to your windows. External shading is going to have a significantly larger impact than just closing internal curtains or blinds.
Make sure you're onto it first thing before any heat can get in.
Next, you need to let the heat run free:
As soon as outside temperatures drop, open your windows to naturally cool the home.
Opening high or upstairs windows will create stack ventilation, letting the hot air rise up and out.
Opening windows on opposite sides of a space will create cross ventilation.
Be a fan of fans:
Fans are a highly efficient way to cool - in some instances they can use 1% of the electricity an air conditioner would use.
If you don't have ceiling fans, consider purchasing a personal fan.
Just remember fans cool people not spaces, so turn them off when you leave the room.
Split-system Air Conditioning:
If you do use your air conditioning unit, it can be more efficient to have it set to a milder temperature and running continuously rather than putting on spontaneous cold blasts.
Alternatively, you could use your system on fan mode to get air movement at a fraction of the energy use.
Hot tip: Clean your cooling system to make sure it's operating at peak efficiency.
Finally, remember to dress to the weather!
