As any homeowner can tell you, utility costs can be a beast during periods of extreme heat. This is particularly true in areas that receive brutally hot summers or summer-like temperatures all year long. However, while cost-effectively cooling your home, it’s by no means impossible. In fact, with the help of a few affordable cooling aids, you should be able to keep your residence comfortably cool without leaving a hole in your savings.
Dependable Ceiling Fans
No modern-day residence should be without dependable ceiling fans. While it’s true that ceiling fans aren’t able to alter indoor temps as quickly as air conditioners, they can effectively complement the efforts of your home’s A/C by distributing the cool air it produces throughout your entire house. Furthermore, if you’re interested in turning your ceiling fans into independent cooling tools, simply adjust their blades to turn counterclockwise. This will enable the fans to produce cool breezes that flow directly downward.
Ceiling fans can also be used to take full advantage of nighttime cooldowns. So, if the temperatures in your area drop significantly during the overnight hours, simply open some windows and allow the fans to circulate the naturally cool air throughout your residence. For maximum effectiveness, take care to install high-quality ceiling fans in every area of your home.
No matter what kinds of ceiling fans you’re looking to purchase, you should have little trouble finding ones that suit your needs perfectly. For example, if you don’t have a lot of ceiling space to work with, limit your options to small ceiling fans.
Blackout Curtains
Allowing large amounts of sunlight into your home during the sun’s peak hours stands to increase indoor temps to a noticeable degree. To get on top of this problem, make a point of keeping your curtains closed during daylight hours. If you enjoy using the sun as a source of natural light, this may be a bit of an adjustment, but it will ultimately help you maintain more agreeable temperatures inside.
If you’re truly serious about keeping sunlight at bay, consider outfitting your home’s windows with blackout curtains. True to their name, these curtains are designed to minimize the amount of sunlight that comes through your home’s windows. Additionally, because these curtains are composed of extra-thick materials, they’re highly adept at sealing in cool air and preventing warm air from getting in through the windows. As an added bonus, if you live in a relentlessly noisy area, you’ll be pleased to learn that many varieties of blackout curtains can effectively drown out outside noise.
Energy-Efficient Doors and Windows
There’s a good chance your current doors and windows are acting as a hindrance to your home cooling efforts. Quite a bit of indoor air finds its way outside through doors and windows, regardless of whether they’re opened or closed. Unsurprisingly, keeping your doors and windows closed can help minimize this problem, but this is hardly a definitive solution.
This is where energy-efficient doors and windows enter the picture. While energy-efficient doors are composed of extra-thick materials, energy-efficient windows contain multiple panes, ensuring that air has to work exceptionally hard to find its way through them. Since these doors and windows limit the amount of cool air that’s able to escape your residence, they can relieve your air conditioning system of some of its burden. The less effort your A/C has to expend, the lower your utility bills are likely to be.
There’s no denying that energy-efficient doors and windows come with higher upfront costs than standard doors and windows. However, investing in them is liable to prove more cost-effective in the long run, as they stand to save you a substantial sum in cooling costs.
Cooling your home during periods of excessive heat is liable to cost you a pretty penny. Depending on how warm a climate you live in and the size of your residence, a sizable chunk of your monthly income may go directly into cooling costs. Fortunately, provided you’re willing to change learned behaviours and do a little outside-the-box thinking, you can make cooling your home significantly more affordable. So, if cost-effective home cooling solutions are what you’re after, make sure to procure the items discussed above.
POSTED BY 
