Frugal Living: Living without Air Conditioning in the Summer?
I recently read an article about saving money during the summer by not running your air conditioner. While I will probably not even try this one, I wanted to share it with some of you guys to see if any of you are brave enough to try it.
The story from the article is that the author hadn’t used the air conditioner in two summers and it was fairly easy to adjust to the change.
The tips are to turn off the a/c (obviously), when you’re spending time outdoors, you are doing so in the shade, do not even turn on the air conditioner in the car, and avoid places that have air conditioners so that you won’t throw off all the adjusting your body has done. The author says that your body will adjust to a certain level of heat and will do whatever it can to keep you cooled as long as you’re drinking plenty of liquids and doing other things to keep yourself cool.
Stay indoors during the hottest part of the day, but stay outside in the shade is one of the tips I didn’t understand at first, then the article went on to say that there are ways to keep your house cooler in the daytime as long as certain measures are taken at night to help your house out the next day. The author suggests getting up in the morning and closing all the windows and doors and to cover them with a heavy shade or black out drape.
Another tip to keeping the house cool is to use less electricity from inside appliances as possible. I will say, in the summer I try to do laundry at night and use a toaster oven to cook when I can to help keep the house cool. This author goes as far as to say don’t dry your clothes in the dryer at all, cook outside on the grill, and use ceiling fans in a counter clockwise direction.
At the end of the day, open all the windows to let in cooler air. I would have a serious problem doing this. Where I live, there are too many different kinds of bugs that can get into my house from the windows, even the windows with screens on them.
The author of the article claims that they were able to save between $60 and $150 a month on their electric bill. Like I said, that is a big reduction in the cost of electricity, but I don’t personally think I could do it for an entire summer. Good luck to anyone that may want to try though!
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This frugal living article is interesting but too bad it doesn’t include some sources. I’m interested in keeping a house cooler at daytime, are there any articles about that?
Thanks! I will definitely write more about air conditioning next weekend! Please check back Saturday or Sunday for more!!!
Great post, Lizzie! People rarely realize that there are cost effective ways to live while still staying comfortable. You definitely know how to live effectively! I’ve been loving your articles. Keep up the good work!
By the way, I never took the time to welcome you to Lucrative Investing. Glad to have you on board! I look forward to reading more of your articles and getting to know you as we’re now colleagues here.
Depends on how efficient your unit is, I could imagine some of the less efficient models costing much more than $150 a month. However if you have a newer model I would predict it would be a lot less than $50 a month and you won’t be a sweaty mess
Like Alistair said, it all depends on the efficiency. We might see an unexpected boom in this industry due to people investing in new, more efficient and cheaper to run machines to decrease costs in a long run.
I think it really depends on where you live on whether or not you will need it. I live in Illinois so it gets hot and humid in the summer. The humidity is a killer. When we were selling our other house the realtor told us to leave the air conditioning on, because if it gets too humid in the house the wood will swell up. It can also do other harm to your home.
Once my air was out in my apartment and it was unbearably humid. If you weren’t in the shower, you would HAVE to be in front of a fan just so you could feel alright.
Try telling that to people living in Ecuadorian areas… Air conditioning in many cases is not a gadget for snobs, it’s a real necessity. Some people’s lives depend on air conditioning. I don’t think I could comply with all these conditions.