Typically, July is the warmest month of the year in Utah. While we’re all spending a little more time inside our homes with the pandemic, it’s important to make sure your home is as cool as it can be, especially in the middle of the day. Join us for some easy tips to keep your home cool, without even buying anything new.
Thanks to GreenHomeGnome.com, Below are some eco-friendly, energy-saving alternatives that will help you stay cool without draining your bank account.
Work with your windows
It’s easy to shut the doors, close the windows and let the AC do the work, but if you understand how the windows of a home can function as a sophisticated system, you’ll be able to more efficiently control the rising level of heat in your home.
- Double-glazed windows can prevent extreme heat from entering your home, and using curtains with a white back will reflect even more sun away from the home.
- Double-hung windows will allow you to open the bottom section of the upwind side and the upper part of the downwind side. This will cause the resulting low pressure to suck air through your home, creating a draft.
- Shutters or external blinds are another way to keep unwanted heat outside, as they’ll provide your home with ventilation and shading at the same time.
Use ceiling fans
Ventilating your rooms doesn’t only keep the air fresh. Moving air will also cause moisture from your skin to evaporate, which will help keep you cooler, too. Installing ceiling fans will do the trick in an eco-friendly way, as they use less electricity than air conditioning, sparing you the high bills of an AC unit. It’s important to keep in mind that ceiling fans function by keeping you cool instead of cooling the room itself. Therefore, they should be turned off when no one’s in the room.
Employ passive cooling techniques
We all know that white reflects and black absorbs, so an easy way to ensure that your house absorbs less sun is to paint the roof white or another light shade. Cool roofs help counteract the effects of climate change by reflecting the sun’s rays away from your home. This means you won’t need to cool the inside of your home as much as you would otherwise, which means less electricity use.
Small fixes:
- LED lights are eco-friendly in comparison with traditional lightbulbs, as they don’t get warm. Therefore, they won’t contribute to raising the level of heat in your home as the old-style lightbulbs do.
- Space filler and patches will close any leaks in the home, keeping the cool air inside and leading to more efficient cooling.
- Choose your cooking times appropriately. By choosing to eat more fresh food during the day and do your cooking in the evenings, you’ll create less heat in your home when the sun is at its strongest. Cooking outside is another way to go.
- When doing laundry, consider drying your clothes outside, using the dryer creates a lot of unnecessary heat.
Grow some shade
There’s nothing more eco-friendly than planting a tree! If you’re starting off small in the planting process, it might take a long time for you to reap the benefits that trees have to offer around your home, but more trees will help our Earth for generations to come.
Having big trees around your home will create loads of shade in the summer, and even smaller plants will create a cooling effect, as the breeze moving through them will pick up humidity and cool the surrounding area. Growing vines on your wall(s) is another way to create this environmental transpiration effect, and these can also act as insulation.
