Tips for Staying Comfortable with Your Air Conditioning
These are our favorite tips for staying comfortable indoors on really hot and humid days.
1. 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.
2. 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 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.
3. 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