Tips for Staying Comfortable with Your Air Conditioning
These are our favorite tips for staying comfortable indoors on really hot and humid days.
- Don’t turn your air conditioner off
Many people don’t realize that it can take less than 3 hours for humidity to return to your home when you turn off your air conditioner and open windows (1), but it can take many more hours to remove the humidity.
- Program the settings on your programmable thermostat
The average air conditioning system will cool a home 1 degree per hour. For this reason, if you want to save some energy, only change the settings by 2-4 degrees when you are not home. If you set your thermostat back to 8 degrees, it could take 8 hours to reach that ideal, programmed temperature, which is much longer than most of us are willing to wait for our house to cool down.
- Check your vents/registers
If one room seems to be excessively warm, make sure that the supply vent is open. Check to make sure that nothing is on top of or blocking a floor vent, such as furniture, toys, or curtains.
Sources
(1) 3 hours is based on calculations for an average home, using the moisture transfer per cubic foot calculation at the site: https://www.nachi.org/moisture-intrusion.htm
