If you come from an area that’s known for extreme summer weather, there’s a good chance your summers are spent struggling to maintain a cool home while keeping utility costs under control. While it’s true that effectively cooling a home on a budget can present some challenges, it isn’t quite the uphill battle you may view it as. In fact, with the right cooling hacks at your disposal, keeping your residence heat-free without breaking the bank should be well within your abilities.
Commit to Regular A/C Maintenance
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of staying on top of A/C maintenance. In the absence of proper maintenance, even the most resilient central air conditioning system is likely to experience large-scale problems and break prematurely. And given how much money a good central A/C system costs, it stands to reason that you’d view these outcomes as less than ideal. Furthermore, the less maintenance your air conditioning system receives, the harder it will need to push itself to do its job effectively – and the harder it pushes itself, the more you can expect to pay in utility costs.
With this in mind, make regular A/C maintenance a priority. To start with, you’ll need to have your system professionally inspected and serviced at least twice a year. In addition to keeping your A/C operating at peak efficiency, this will help ensure that small problems are nipped in the bud before they have a chance to do real damage to both your system and your finances.
However, as important as regular maintenance visits are, they shouldn’t be viewed as a catch-all remedy for every possible issue. In all likelihood, you’re going to be met with the occasional A/C problem, and when you are, it’s in your best interest to call in the professionals posthaste. You may not like spending the money, but the earlier you address A/C issues, the more you stand to save in the long run.
Hang Thermal Curtains
Unbeknownst to many of us, we lose a considerable amount of cool air through our windows throughout the summertime. Even if said windows are firmly closed, cool air is likely to exit and warm air is likely to gain entrance through them. As such, minimizing the amount of air lost through your windows can help you maintain consistently cool indoor temps.
When looking for effective, affordable tools to help you in this quest, you can’t go wrong with thermal curtains. Per the name, these curtains are composed of thermal materials whose thickness makes them ideal for sealing in cool air from your A/C and keeping warm air from outside at bay. And while thermal curtains won’t completely eliminate the problem of escaped air, they’ll help keep it to the barest of minimums.
As an added bonus, many thermal curtains double as blackout curtains, which can prove useful to anyone who has trouble sleeping through the early morning hours during the summer. Given how early the sun rises throughout the summertime, those of us who sleep best in total darkness often have our slumber interrupted by incessantly bright sunlight. Furthermore, since some thermal curtains help drown out exterior noise, these window dressings are ideal for areas with lots of cars, foot traffic or general noise pollution.
Install Reliable Ceiling Fans
Reliable ceiling fans are an absolute must for any home, especially during the exhaustingly hot summer months. Not only can good ceiling fans maximize the efforts of your air conditioning system by distributing the cool it produces throughout your entire home, they can also function as effective cool aids unto themselves. For example, by adjusting a ceiling fan’s blades to turn counterclockwise, you’ll enable it to produce downward-flowing cool breezes. So, whether you’re in the market for a new bedroom fan or looking to buy a chandelier ceiling fan, there’s no time like the present to enhance your home cooling efforts.
The constant struggle to keep cooling costs in check effectively puts a damper on many of our summers. As much as we may enjoy the long sunny days and warm weather associated with this time of year, exorbitant utility bills prevent us from fully embracing the summer season. Fortunately, a comfortably cooled home and reasonable cooling costs don’t have to be mutually exclusive. If you’re ready to bid a not-so-fond farewell to unmanageable summertime utility bills, simply put the cooling hacks discussed above into practice.
