this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2023
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Honestly, no. I’ll credit three things - first, I trained my family to have the fear of god of the high-tier TOU charges. Second, I programmed my power-hungry devices to not run during on-peak. And third, we had a pretty mild summer up until this past week or so.
My last two excel bills have have $95 and $98 for a central air conditioned 1600 sq ft house.
The modifications I made to get here: ~ I put ceiling fans in every room that we spend a lot of time in. Bedrooms and living room. They’re on 24/7 and the very slight breeze is really helpful in making it feel a degree or two cooler than it actually is.
~Whole house fan. I have mine connected to my HomeAssistant and evaluating every hour if it should run for ten minutes. I leave a secured basement window open, so it exhausts the hot attic air and sucks cooler basement air upstairs. Once the sun sets and the exterior temp is lower than my upstairs temp, it will run all night until the sun rises and the exterior temp is greater than the indoor temp.
My A/C rarely runs more than an hour or so a day. There have been a few days where I ran it for hours to try and cool the house for guests and a few days where it was a little stuffy around 5PM while we waited for the sun to set, but it hasn’t been too bad.