Approaching air conditioning logically
I love this time of year because the air conditioning isn’t running night and day.
That’s a big change for us and we all relish the short months that our heat pump is actually quiet.
Yet even though it’s mid January, I’m already strategizing when it comes to our air conditioning use this year. We’ve been down here now for more than 5 years so it’s time to ease up on the thermostat setting. Of course, when we first moved down here, it was quite a shock to deal with the level of heat and humidity that comes with this region. So during the summer, all we could do was lean into the air conditioning to try to manage the hottest months of the summer. From June through September, the heat and humidity are oppressive. And since we really didn’t know any better, we just kept piling on more and more cooling. But that comes with some costs. Obviously, using that much air conditioning is expensive from a utility standpoint. It’s also putting a lot of wear and tear on the residential HVAC unit. But there’s also a sort of a hidden cost as well. When you use that much air conditioning, just going outside feels like you’re on the surface of the sun. So this spring, we’re going with a new strategy that should help us in the summer as well. We’re going to wait on starting the air conditioning until the temperatures are more consistently in the nineties. That should allow our bodies to acclimate to the rising temperatures. So by summer, we should need a whole lot less air conditioning and the summer won’t feel so overwhelming.