by | Feb 24, 2020 | Off Grid Living
If your simple objective is to reduce your electricity expenses, then finding ways of keeping yourself thermally comfortable both day and night is part of the challenge. If you can reduce the need to operate fans or more importantly air conditioners at any time, this will impact the size of your quarterly bill in your favour.
If you live in a climate zone that maintains reasonably comfortable temperatures throughout the seasons, then you possibly don’t to spend as much money on heating or cooling as the average family. If your comfort tolerances for both heat and cold have greater latitude than the average person, then you too may have more left on your credit card after paying your quarterly bill.
But for those people who live in climate zones that tend to experience more extreme temperature fluctuations and also including those who are less tolerant of hot or the cold weather, the story is a little different as there may be a greater need to press the button on some electrical gadget to bring the ambient temperature closer to what is considered the sweet spot.
Everyone has their own threshold on when they need to start consuming electricity to make themselves a little bit more comfortable. Of course a clever person is not going to be guzzling hot chocolate on a day that’s 40 degrees in the shade. That’s certainly something you would not want to be doing but here are three things that you might like to consider.
Shade, Seal and Insulate. This is not new rocket science, so let’s examine them one by one with a couple of examples that each household can modify for their own advantage.
Shade. If the sun has the opportunity at any time through the day to heat up any part of the inside of your home, create shade to stop this from happening. You do not want the furniture or the floor or the internal walls or the anything being exposed to the sun at any time through a hot summer’s day. Don’t be paying to cool them down with an increased air conditioning bill when you could have easily stopped them heating up in the first place. If your home is orientated such that the sun is permitted access through any window of your home on a what will be a hot day, simply close the curtains and deny access. You are the boss, you make the rules. That is an easy fix in the short term but consider planting a deciduous tree in a convenient place to block the summer sun at the worst part of the day as an investment into the future. That is one of many longer-term solutions. Deciduous trees have leaves for shade in the summer time but lose their leaves to allow the sun through in the winter.
Seal. A leaky house allows convection which allows the movement of air from one room to the other or from the inside of the house to the outside of the house and versa of visa. Cat doors, open fireplaces, unsealed windows, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about; make sure you seal them all up. During the summer months what you don’t want is the coldest air escaping from leaky windows or from under doors at floor level. In the wintertime, because hot air rises, gaps that are not airtight between the walls and the ceiling will compromise achieving the temperatures in a home that you are actively pursuing.
Insulate. Now you may already have bats in your belfry or even in your ceiling which was a clever move by whoever decided to put them up there. This is especially true if you have a tiled roof and live in a hot climate. Tiles radiate heat almost all night after being exposed to a hot summer’s day. To insulate is to restrict the radiation of heat energy into areas where you don’t want it and on a hot day you don’t want that happening anywhere.
If your simple objective is to reduce your electricity expenses then do what needs to be done to set yourself up for thermal success and therefore a saving on power bills.
Benjamin Franklin said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
You have the ability to do it, so just do it.
John Lynn