Summer is back in Northwest Arkansas, and summer in the south can be a little difficult to live through if you don’t have a few good tips for keeping your home cool. When you are a homeowner, keeping the temperatures cool in your home isn’t only about physical comfortability but financial comfortability as well!
Luckily, there are a few easy and efficient ways to help keep the temps tolerable! We gathered five solid tips to help your home stay cooler, and your bank account a little happier. All are easy to add to the daily to-do list to get you and yours through the hot Arkansas summer!
#1. Check Your Windows
Make sure you keep your curtains are closed, especially through the hottest part of the day! This simple step can help keep your AC running much better, because it doesn’t have to work so hard to combat the outside temps. Make sure your blinds are turned the correct way, too! Did you know that in the summer months you should have your blinds slats tilted up with the rounded side facing out? This is so that the heat coming through the windows moves to the ceiling, instead of the floor, it keeps you cooler and it saves on the energy bill, too!
#2. Adjust Your Ceiling Fans
Another lesser known summer hack for homeowners; change your ceiling fan rotation! In the hot months, you can keep yourself much more comfortable if you set your ceiling fans to the counterclockwise rotation, and adjust the fan speed to high. The counterclockwise rotation will push cool air down to the floors, and since cool air evaporates perspiration, it creates a wind chill effect for your own comfort, without affecting the rooms temperature. Science is cool, and if you do this to your fans, you should be too!
#3. Keep Interior Doors Open
If you are old enough to be a homeowner, chances are, you remember hearing your grandparents or parents yelling at you to keep the bedroom/bathroom doors closed in the summer. When central heating and air units were less evolved, that practice saved on energy and kept the open areas of the house much cooler. Times have changed, though, as has the efficiency of our home cooling systems! If you leave your doors closed, air that’s still blowing out of the vent builds in the room, pressurizing it. At the same time, the return is making an extra effort to suck in enough air to cool the entire house. Leaving the doors open, however, allows for proper and efficient circulation and will save you money on your bill!
#4. Turn On Your Exhaust Fans
Most bathrooms and kitchens are equipped with exhaust fans, and are more useful in the summer months than most people realize! Exhaust fans are great to use while cooking to pull steam out of your face, or while showering, as they pull the heat and humidity into the vent and can help protect your bathrooms from humidity damage. Utilizing these fans in the summer, whether you’re cooking, showering or just reading a book, can save you money and keep you noticeably cooler. Turning them on during the hot summer days so they can do exactly as they were designed to do; to draw heat from surrounding area, is a simple and efficient hack every homeowner should know! You could even leave them on when you won’t be home to save some extra energy costs!
#5. Use Large Appliances Wisely
Using the dryer, the oven, or the dishwasher can raise the temp in your house pretty quickly! Large appliances require a lot of energy and produce a lot of extra heat. Be sure you’re using these things in the cooler parts of the day, if possible. Making use of the outside grill to feed the family can save you on energy costs, and the more you save, the more steak you can buy! Luckily summer time means less clothing too, so it isn’t as daunting to save the laundry for later. Paper plates work great in the summer to save on dishwasher usage, and they also happen to be super convenient for outside eating, which works out if you utilize your outside grill!
Homes By Roth has a long history of providing beautiful homes for our wonderful clients. Here at Homes By Roth we believe our clients should get to live their best life in their best home and we hope to help that become your reality with these energy saving, cost efficient homeowner tips for the summer! We know when the temperature rises, home costs follow suit, but with these easy homeowner-hacks you can have more control of the high bills that often go hand-in-hand with high temps.
Bonus Tip!
Faux Fan AC
The faux fan AC is a great way to get cooled off quick!! It’s a simple set up that anyone can do for a nice, refreshing, and fast cool-down. It only requires two things; a bowl of ice and a box fan! Just fill a mixing bowl full of ice, and position at an angle in front of a large box fan, and turn the fan on. When the fan is turned on the air whips off the ice at an extra chilled and extra misty temp. A great tip if you’ve been outside working all day and just need to cool off quick!