As the summer temperatures start to rise, many families are trying to find a balance between keeping their homes cool and keeping themselves from spending all of their money on their monthly air conditioning expenses.
Luckily, with a little planning and flexibility, you can find ways to keep your home from getting too hot without having to crank your a/c all day long. To show you how this can be done, here are three tips for keeping your home cool without breaking the bank.
Embrace The Shade
During the summer, the darker you can keep your house, the cooler it’s going to be inside. One of the best ways to do this from the inside is to keep the shades drawn on your windows, especially the windows that are facing direct sunlight.
According to Samantha Toscano, a contributor to the Huffington Post, keeping your shades drawn can keep your home up to 20 degrees cooler. So if you’re thinking that opening the blinds on your windows isn’t really making much of a difference, you’re sorely mistaken.
If you’re looking for a more long-term solution for keeping your home in more shade, you might want to consider planting trees around your home so they can shade your entire home from direct sunlight in the summer.
Use Your Fans First
If your home has ceiling fans in any of its rooms, it can be very helpful to your electrical bills and energy usage is you turn them on first before adjusting the temperature on your air conditioner.
To get the most use out of your ceiling fans, Melina Gillies, a contributor to Family Handyman, recommends that you run the ceiling fan counterclockwise. By doing this, the ceiling fans will draw the cooler air of your home upwards and allow it to spread throughout the room more evenly.
Additionally, if you have any other fans around your home, like box fans or oscillating fans, those can be extremely helpful for fighting the heat as well.
Fill In The Cracks
One reason your home might start feeling hotter than you think it should could be because the cool air you’re trying to keep inside is finding ways to escape. Dana McMahan, a contributor to NBC News, shares that if you add up all the space left open from little cracks all around your home, the average house would have a hole the size of a basketball in it.
With holes adding up to this size all throughout your home, it’s wise to go throughout your entire property and look for areas that you can fill or cover so less air is escaping during the summer and creeping in during the winter.
If you’re wanting to keep your home cooler while avoiding using your air conditioner, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you do just that.