The past eight days have been a roller coaster ride in the KnowitAll household--we've been without air conditioning since May 29th. One minute our air conditioning unit was working just fine, the next it was blowing warm air and nothing else. After a visit from an HVAC expert, it was decided that our compressor was blown and we needed a new unit.  The new air conditioning unit is being installed today by Action Heating and Cooling (our new best friends!) after several very warm days in the Cincinnati region. We were very concerned, worried the house would get unbearably hot. Luckily, it hasn't gotten above 78 degrees! In fact, most of the time it has been at 76 degrees or below. We consider that a HUGE success! The strangest part was that it was hotter in the house in the beginning of the week than it was at the end--even though we'd had three days above 90 degrees in that time. Each day that we used the steps below we saw the overall house temp fall by a degree or two each day.  We were able to do that using a combination of techniques that I thought I'd share with you. The success of these small steps have made us re-think how we live everyday, and the things we can continue to do going forward to keep our home cool for less! 

1. The biggest step we took used natural cooling. Every night at about 9:00 p.m. we'd open every window in the house, and leave them open all night long. We put fans in the windows, and pulled in the cool night air. We'd wait until the temperature outside had dropped to 78 degrees or below, then open them. 
2. We'd then close the windows once the temperature went above 76 degrees. This is important and a step many people miss. Close the windows in the morning to trap the cool air in!  Many open the windows at night but leave them open in the daytime too. Even if you have no a/c, close them up! That traps the cooler air inside. 
3. Move fans to the center of the room and use it to move air around the room. Fans near the floor pointed upward redirect any cool air upwards into the room.
4. Close all window shades, blinds and drapes while the sun is up. This will slow down much of the natural warming of the house during the hottest parts of the day. I've found that when closing the blinds, turning it so the blinds are the opposite direction from their normal position blocks more sunlight than the normal closed position. Our home faces West, getting full morning and full afternoon sun, with absolutely no shade on the back side for the morning sun. Very nice in the winter--but we have to keep the blinds closed tightly in the summer!
5. Close off the doors to the basement and any stairwells if you can. Many people falsely believe that leaving those doors open allows more cool air to circulate throughout the house. That's false. Cool air falls, hot air rises. So what it does is allow any cool air in upper levels of the home to fall down the stairs to lower levels, while any warm air in lower levels rises up, heating up those upper levels even more. 
6. Turn off any unnecessary lights, especially traditional incandescent light bulbs. They put off more heat than light. Reading online we found that one traditional bulb can raise a small room's temperature as much as 11 degrees in only one hour! CFL bulbs put out some heat, but not nearly as much as a traditional bulb. We quickly realized that we were having to run the a/c extra during the summer to cool down the rooms from the light bulbs we were using!
7. Avoid using appliances and items that put out heat while in use. Instead of using a hair dryer we let our hair dry naturally as much as we could--then used the cool setting on the dryer for styling the hair. We avoided using the oven and the coffee pot, made sure computers and video game units were turned off fully when not in use, and limited our microwave usage to 60 seconds or less at a time.