Plan C is for COOL!

My husband and I are both hot-natured. We love a cool house, especially at night. But alas, cool comes at a price. About 15 cents per kilowatt hour, it seems.

So in an effort to lower the utility bill last month, I thought I might placed fans strategically throughout the house to circulate air and get rid of hot spots. The theory is that this plan would allowing the central air conditioning thermostat to be set a few degrees higher. It worked! We remained cool. Trouble was, we saw no monetary savings at the end of the month! What we saved in running the A/C was apparently spent running the 3 extra fans. So much for Plan A.

So Plan B followed the theory of "don't blow the air around with fans (ceiling or otherwise)... let hot air rise and stay up high, let cold air fall and cool the lower 4-5 feet of the house, the most lived-in part." I can see the logic in that. I happen to enjoy a breeze on my face, and so does my husband, so this was a short-lived option for us. Besides, the A/C vents in our living room are about 9 feet up the wall with an 18-foot-high room. So cool air is having to pass through the warm air just to blow down to us, and that can't be good. And certainly doesn't make sense.

We've discovered that the living room is the coolest room of the house (2 story) while the master bedroom and kitchen (both 1 story) are the warmest. So running the A/C at night was leaving the rest of the downstairs quite cool, only t to have our bedroom marginally comfortable. So my husband and I enacted Plan C: he installed a window A/C unit in the master bedroom!

We've had it on for 2 nights now, and it's blissfully cool in our bedroom, and the slight hum of it is rather soothing. It is a nice "white noise" that blocks other nighttime sounds from trains or dogs barking. We are now able to stay cool at night and turn off the A/C unit to the rest of the downstairs during the night. In the morning, we turn on the downstairs A/C and turn off the window unit. (The children have their own A/C unit for their bedrooms upstairs, so they are not suffering, either.) I'll give you a report on Plan C in a month as to whether or not our utility bill is lower.