When professionals look at air conditioners, two important factors come to mind. The first factor is cooling power, i.e. how cool your home is when it operates. The second factor is energy consumption because nobody wants to purchase an air conditioner that drains all the energy in their home. Both of these points need to be balanced on an every swaying scale, and that’s what we call efficiency!
Energy efficiency is the lifeblood of what HVAC technicians study. Half of our work is trying to decipher why your air conditioner is consuming so much energy, or why it’s not cooling your home to your proper standards. Though, what if we told you that there are things even you could do to improve the energy efficiency of your system?
Take it from your favorite HVAC company in Thousand Oaks, CA—you’re going to be delighted by the tips and tricks we have to offer when you realize they could save you a lot of money in the long run!
Keep Your Home Cool and Your Bills Low
With these next few tips, it’s important to remember that these might only help a little bit individually but make a large impact when done together. Keeping an air conditioner running smoothly, just like your car, requires a lot of attention and various conscious efforts to keep bills low and the machinery happy.
Raise the Temperature
We understand how this might sound, but hear us out! When temperatures get brutally high here in California, our air conditioners can only reasonably cool our homes to about 20 degrees below what it feels like outside. While that doesn’t seem like a lot, the natural dehumidifying aspect of air conditioning mixed with that cooling power usually makes that 20-degree difference feel like more than enough.
The problem is that many homeowners with struggling AC systems tend to turn the temperature on the thermostat further down if the air conditioner is struggling. This won’t help your predicament at all, and will in fact cause it to consume more energy for no real difference. Raise the temperature a little bit, let your system relax, and do some other things that might help cool your home down.
Draw the Blinds or Curtains
Sunlight still provides a large amount of the heat we feel in our homes during the summer. While windows can be a wonderful, aesthetically pleasing aspect of your house, they’re constantly letting in sunlight that is both making your home hotter and making it harder for your air conditioner to keep you comfortable. By drawing the curtains and lowering the blinds on windows that face the sun, you’re lowering your home by at least one or two degrees, which can make a huge difference through the course of a day, week, or even month!
Use Your Ceiling Fan
While running your ceiling fan in the wintertime can be a good way to push rising heat back down into your home, running it the opposite way will draw heat away from you. This allows cool air to permeate the lower half of your room, which is where you spend your time!
Still having trouble with AC efficiency? Call JMS Air Conditioning and Heating today for an expert opinion.
