A hot summer is great, but not if you can’t get any relief from the heat inside your home. Keeping your house cool and comfortable can be a challenge, but you can use some of these tips to help.
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Have Your A/C Serviced
If you have air conditioning in your home, having it checked and cleaned should be at the top of your list of summer maintenance tasks. This makes sure that your A/C is in good working order, ready for its hardest working time of year. Book a residential air duct cleaning to make sure the system is ready to tackle the heat.
Close Your Blinds
You might not want to shut out the sunshine, but if your home gets really hot, it does help to close your blinds. If a particular room gets unbearable, close the blinds to block out the worst of the heat, especially if you have north or west-facing windows.
Create Shade
If you can block the sunlight from reaching your house, you can reduce the heat too. Create some shade over the house, using trees, large potted plants, awnings, and other exterior shelters. Deciduous trees are a good choice, as this will cast shade over the house in the summer to block some of the heat, and as the leaves fall in the winter, you can let the sunshine through again to keep the house warm.
Adjust Your Ceiling Fans
It can sometimes feel as though fans are just stirring the hot air around the house rather than doing anything to cool it down. If you haven’t set up your fans correctly, they could actually be doing that.
Set your fans to rotate counter-clockwise during the summer so the air is pushed straight down to cool down the room. In the winter, set them clockwise to pull cool air up. When the weather is warm, set the fan speed to high, and low in cooler weather. Ceiling fans can be used alongside other cooling methods, so checking which way they’re going can make a big difference to how warm your home gets.
Close Doors And Seal Gaps
Close the doors into any rooms that you aren’t currently using, so you can keep the cool air where you actually need it. If you have any gaps around doors and windows, seal them up. You can use draught excluders to keep the cool air in the room and stopping it from escaping.
Remember that if you have an evaporative air-conditioner, this will work better if you do leave some doors and windows open to increase the airflow around the house.
Hack Your Fans
If you don’t have air-conditioning, you can fake it with a clever hack for your fans. All you need to turn your normal fan into a cold mist machine is a bowl of ice. Fill a shallow bowl or a pan with ice and position it in front of your fan to get an icy breeze, without any air-conditioning.
