Here are some tips and tricks to help you stay comfortable in your hot summer home.
- Keep your curtains or blinds closed all day. It’s a good idea to get them closed as early on in the day as you can. It will help stop the sun from shinning through the windows, which heats up the inside. Pulling your curtains across or your blinds down essentially stops your home from becoming a greenhouse.
- Grill out, instead. Keep your oven off as this can transmit heat into your kitchen, for example.
- If you want the air conditioning to permeate throughout the house, keep all of the doors open. Conversely, if you want to keep a certain area cooler than others, providing it has access to air conditioning, close the doors.
- Cold Air Fan Hack – The trick here is to fill a bowl with ice. You then position the ice at an angle in front of a fan. The air will whip off the ice and give a soft, cool, breeze.
- Run your ceiling fans. Set your fans to run counter clockwise in the summer.
- The Not So Hot Water Bottle – If you have a hot water bottle, which you utilize in the winter, you can use it the opposite way in the summer. Simply fill with water and place in the freezer.
- Throw out incandescent lights – This type of lighting waste 90 percent of the energy they use as heat. Throwing them and replacing them with fluorescent lights, for example, may make a difference to the cooling of your home.