Ways to cut your summer cooling costs

    Every fall, when Nebraska stares down the barrel of coming cold weather, people hear plenty of advice about preparing the house.
    But it’s just as important to prepare your house for a Nebraska/Colorado summer, which often brings the kind of weather that makes you wonder how, and even why, people lived here before central air.
    Ways to do that range from simple cleaning to actually modifying the house.
    Aaron Troxell of Troxell’s Heating and Appliance in Imperial said the cleaning part includes both outside and inside work.
    “The best thing to do is to make sure the outdoor (air conditioning) unit, the coil around it, isn’t plugged,” Troxell said. “You know, a lot of cotton or dirt on it. Those are easily washed out.”
    As for inside cleaning, it’s the same as for winter: Make sure you change your furnace filter at least monthly.
    “In the summertime, your system’s going to run a lot more, because it’s harder to cool a house than it is to heat it,” he said.
“That’s the easiest maintenance a homeowner can do. Keep it clean, indoor or outdoor unit, you’ll save on energy year-round.”
    For those seeking a little bigger project, “insulation’s the biggest key, especially attic insulation in the summertime,” Troxell said. “You’d be surprised what a world of difference 10 inches of insulation would make in cooling costs.”
    The best kind of insulation is the blown-in kind, which eliminates the gaps often found in the traditional fiberglass batting insulation.
    Troxell said unlike the batting, blown-in insulation covers the studs in the attic. While relatively small, the gaps in the studs can leak cool air (or warm air, during the winter), reducing insulation’s effectiveness.
    Of course, there are things you shouldn’t do as well, he said. “A lot of people like to open their windows. It’s a bad idea if you have air conditioning, because it makes that air conditioner work harder and harder to get that humidity down.” Especially in the last few years, he said, this area has seen higher humidity in the summer, making hot weather feel that much worse.
     If you have money for more extensive work, the attic still is the place to spend it.
    Hondo Fanning of HFC Egress Windows in Wauneta said homeowners who don’t already have them should consider installing roof vents and soffits to give otherwise trapped heat a way to escape.
    Another move would be to add awnings and/or curtains to south-facing windows to keep the direct sunlight from feeding into the house.
This time of year, the south side tends to get the most sunlight, he said.
    While floor fans just tend to move hot, humid air around, “I really like the whole-house fan,” Fanning said.
    Those larger fans are attached to a wall or ceiling and at night, when the weather is cool, the homeowner can open the windows, turn it on and move enough cooler air in to keep the house comfortable even in the heat of the following day.
    Even if the house heats up to around 80 degrees, “kick on the whole-house fan and open up your windows and it’ll cool the whole house down just immediately.
It’s sucking in an enormous amount of air; you open up your bedroom and it’s like a breeze coming through your whole house.”

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