4 Ways To Keep Your Home Cool For The Summer

When you’re hot, you’re hot. You don’t want to save up for additional changes to your home or landscape to make your home cooler, like adding fans, upgrading your cooling system or insulation, or adding trees. To keep your home cool for the summer right now, you need quick tips and tricks. Here are four of the best we’ve seen to make an impact on your home’s heat and energy consumption.

Let us know if you have any questions about homes, or how to build them in energy-efficient and cool ways!

1. Cover Windows

The biggest contributor to home heat is solar heat. Keep the sun out most of the day with large curtains over most if not all windows. If you can find blackout or insulated curtains, those will work best. Not only does sun come in through your window panes, but warm air also has a better chance of leaking in through window and door casings. A thick blanket can also do the trick, if you can find a way to hang it.

Nice looking Room

2. Set Fans Correctly

If you have ceiling fans in your home, it’s important to switch the rotation and speed depending on your goal. For the summer heat, the perfect mixture is:

Counter-Clockwise Rotation + Fast = Cooling Effect

This combination blows air down quickly, which creates a cooling effect when it runs past your skin. The fans lose their effectiveness if no one is in the room, as they don’t actually cool the air. So save energy by turning them off when not in the room.

3. Cook And Clean Early Or Late

Another huge contributor to home heat are kitchens, bathrooms and laundry rooms.

Plan your biggest session of cooking and cleaning for early morning or late evening. This way you aren’t creating addition heat in the hottest part of the day. Ovens, stovetops, showers, baths, dishwashers, washing machines, dryers and irons all create excess heat in your home. By saving these for evening, it’s easier to vent the heat outside.

4. Open Windows At Morning And Night

During the times when you’re able to pull your curtains off of the windows, open them up! Ideally, open up one window on each side/floor of the house, to create a cross-draft. Many think it’s best to open windows directly across from each other, but you can actually create a chimney effect by opening windows on different floors. This allows the air to flow throughout the entire home. Since hot air naturally rises, opening a windward side window on the lower floor and a leeward side window on an upper floor can really create a cooling effect.