After a really cool spring, it’s officially summer time in San Diego! And that means trying to stay cool, and if you’re thinking about clever ways to save while you do it, you’re in the right place.
The first thing you’ll want to invest in, is tools to measure your home, so you can track your progress.
You can start as cheap as about $35 for some bluetooth homekit enabled devices like the Switchbot Hygrometer / Thermometers. These little guys will record locally until you sync with your phone, allowing you to display graphs over the course of a day. And because they monitor temperatures and humidity you’ll get a pretty comprehensive picture of your environment.
IR Laser thermometers are another good choice, allowing you to point the laser beam at all sorts of surfaces to get a quick reading of temperature.
Finally the rolls royce of measurement tools would be an infrared camera system like the FLIR Camera Pro. These addons make your smartphone able to see in the infrared spectrum, to see things even behind drywall. Point it at your ceiling, and you will be able to see where your attic insulation is good, and where it is poor. You’ll even see wood joists that radiate more heat than the surrounding insulation.
Let’s start with the cheapest and more universal option no matter where you live:
Popular the world over, there’s no cheaper way to stay cool, than to install ceiling fans in the rooms you occupy the most.
Even in a room as warm as 85 degrees F, with a good ceiling fan, you’ll feel cool as the convection of the moving airs cools off your skin. Ceiling fans do not cool your room, there’s no way they can, because they don’t move heat out. But by keeping the air moving, you’ll feel cooler via convection.
Heat Blocking Window Tint
This was an interesting one that Juan thought we should try out. If you have modern newer dual pane windows you won’t need this. But if you have older windows that look really clear, they probably don’t have this heat-blocking film. Made with titanium inlays, this film will actually block the heat, getting warming, and transmitting some of the heat back outside.
Now this stuff requires some patience to get a good result, so if you’re not looking to get a good seal to your glass, or have the patience to work out bubbles and get the glass clean, this might not be for you. But the results are quite impressive, and it really does keep the heat out.
You can save even more money by just applying this to the south-facing windows of your home if you’re in the northern hemisphere. At about $30 and a few hours to intall, this is a pretty great bang for your buck product, and something I’d recommend checking out.
Again if you have newer windows you wont need this, as it’ll make your rooms too dark, since you likely already have an anti-heat layer.
A whole house fan is a great tool if you have cool nights. Once temperatures drop below about 70 degrees, you’d open your windows and run a whole house fan. They are massive high CFM fans that shoot the air in your home into the attic. This displaces the hotter attic air by forcing it out the attic vents, and thus cools off both your home and attic. By doing this, the whole house fan will draw in cooler outside air into your home. Leave windows in your living room areas open while you’re awake, then close them and open bedroom windows when you’re ready for bed. These run on between 300-600 watts, and can do a pretty good job of cooling your home.
These only work if you live somewhere with cool nights. If temperatures are still high even into the night where you live, this won’t really work for you.
Now this one is really interesting, and depending on where you live this could be a game changer. First of all, at its core, what it is doing, is what your body does when it sweats. By running water over some fine coils, it increases the surface area of the water, and blows a fan over it, forcing the water to evaporate and absorb heat energy in the process. This actually does COOL your room or home, but it does so at the cost of introducing humidity. When I ran it in my room in San Diego, I started with 85 deegrees F and 40% humidity. In about 30 minutes, the temperatures in my room dropped to 73 degrees, at 80% humidity.
You also have to open other windows around your home, because the air being fed into your home will increase the pressure and the air needs somewhere to go. So open windows in the rooms you’re going to be in.
If it cools off outside after a while, you can turn off the water pump, and just use it as a whole house fan.
These systems run on between 200-400 watts depending on the size and air speed settings. They also use between 2-4 gallons of water per hour. So again depending on how scarce water is where you live, this might be a good option.
But remember that if your humidity levels are high like in Florida, this wont work very well, because the humidity will be high, and the airs ability to take on more water content will be greatly diminished, and therefore will greatly diminish the cooling effect.
