If you live in an area with year-round warm weather and/or brutally hot summers, home cooling is likely among your foremost priorities. Unfortunately, since maximizing home cooling efforts is often thought to be a costly undertaking, many people settle for subpar cooling in their respective residences. In addition to making your home uncomfortable, reluctance to maximize your cooling efforts actually stands to cost you more than upgrading your home cooling apparatus. Anyone seeking to step up their home cooling efforts while saving a bundle in the process would do well to consider the following tips.
Make Air Conditioner Maintenance a Priority
Since your home’s central A/C unit is arguably your strongest line of defense against extreme heat, it’s in your best interest to keep it in peak condition. Among other things, this entails cleaning the device and changing its filter on a regular basis. Perhaps most importantly, however, good A/C maintenance requires you to have your central air conditioner professionally inspected and serviced at least twice a year. Additionally, depending on how much use your A/C gets, you may need to have it serviced even more often.
Heating and cooling professionals will thoroughly inspect your central air conditioning unit, identify any potential problems they come across and fix those problems before they have a chance to become much worse – and much costlier to repair. Furthermore, if you’re not up to cleaning and/or replacing filters, these individuals will take on those tasks, as well. If need be, heating and cooling pros can also help redirect airflow.
It’s also important to remember that even with regular service visits, your central air conditioner is probably going to exhibit the occasional problem. Unsurprisingly, the longer such problems are ignored, the worse they tend to become. In the interest of nipping A/C issues in the bud and saving big on repair costs, make sure to call in a professional the next time your central air conditioner starts acting up. Spending a little now is preferable to spending a fortune down the road or having to replace your A/C long before its projected lifespan is up.
The more maintenance your central air conditioning unit receives, the more efficiently it will run – and the more efficiently it runs, the less you can expect to pay in utility costs. So, if you’ve allowed A/C maintenance to fall by the wayside, now would be time to correct this mistake. Additionally, to protect your meticulously-maintained A/C and the various other big-ticket appliances in your home, start exploring homeowners insurance policies.
Stop Using Incandescent Light Bulbs
Energy-efficient light bulbs are nothing new. In fact, we’ve been hearing about how advantageous ditching traditional incandescent bulbs can be for decades. Increased bulb life, reduced energy consumption and long-term value are just a few of the benefits associated with making the switch to CFL, LED or halogen bulbs. Embracing energy-efficient bulbs can also be a boon to home cooling efforts, as these bulbs give off far less heat than incandescents. So, if all of your home’s light fixtures and lamps are currently occupied by traditional bulbs, don’t be surprised if some areas are warmer than you’d like them to be.
For the sake of cooling off your home, reducing your household’s carbon footprint and getting more use out of your light bulbs, don’t hold off on making the switch to energy-efficient bulbs any longer. Yes, these bulbs generally cost a little more than incandescents, but the long-term savings they’ll help facilitate should more than make up for this short-term expense.
Install Reliable Ceiling Fans
Although many of us tend to regard ceiling fans as second-tier substitutes for air conditioning, they can often prove to be every bit as essential to our home cooling efforts. For best results, you should install high-quality ceiling fans in every area of your home. This will help facilitate good air circulation and effectively distribute the cool air produced by your A/C throughout your entire residence. Additionally, by adjusting a ceiling fan’s blades to spin counterclockwise, you’ll enable it to push air directly downward and create a cooling breeze in the process.
Uncomfortably hot temperatures are among the last things many of us want in our homes. Unfortunately, if you reside in an area with blazingly hot weather, keeping your home nice and cool without breaking the bank can seem like a tall order. While bolstering your home cooling efforts may require a bit of short-term spending, this small financial sacrifice can help facilitate long-term savings. So, if a cost-effectively cooled home is what you’re after, consider the measures discussed above.
