One of the best ways to save money in the summer is to have an air conditioner that works well. There are a few ways to ensure that your air conditioner works well this summer, which will keep your family from having to deal with any hot-house broken-air-conditioner days and will save you money in the long run.

One way to make sure your air conditioner stays in good shape is to have a professional come in for a maintenance appointment every year before the cooling season. This might seem like an unnecessary expense, but it can keep you from having to actually pay to repair your air conditioner, which can be very expensive and annoying. Besides this, keeping up on your air conditioner maintenance can keep the whole system clean, and it can give you some notice about when things might need replaced. That way, you can at least see it coming when an expensive repair might be in your near future or when you might need to replace your air conditioning system

Another way to keep your air conditioner in good shape is to run it less often. Throughout the summer, you can go easy on your air conditioner by setting your thermostat up a little bit higher, which can also save on your energy costs, of course. Besides this, you can keep your south-facing windows covered by curtains or blinds, which can help keep your rooms much cooler even without the air conditioner. Also, putting exhaust fans in your warmest rooms and running ceiling fans along with your air conditioning system can help you save on air conditioning and run your system less.

 You can also keep your system working less by shading the actual air conditioner if it is outside of your home. Make sure that you don’t plant anything too close to the box, but put trees or tall, decorative grasses around the air conditioning box that will keep it cooler so that it has to work less. Besides making your air conditioner work less, this can also hide that unsightly metal contraption from the comfort of your back yard.

If you’re building a house from scratch or completely redoing your HVAC system, you can use this same concept to keep your air conditioner cooler. Put the air conditioning unit on the north side of your home where it will be shaded for most of the day, especially during the hottest parts of the day. This way, you can keep your air conditioning unit in the shade without having to rely on the landscaping.

Although you’ll always have to replace your air conditioning system in a timely fashion, you’ll be able to keep it in better shape for longer if you can keep it from running quite as hard. Keeping your air conditioned maintained on a regular basis will also help it stay in better shape. Taking all these simple steps can save you lots of money in air conditioning costs, and it can also help save you from expensive air conditioner repairs.

 

 

If you’re looking at buying a new heating and cooling system for your home, you need to find ways to save money. If you’re like most consumers, you want to buy a high quality, high efficiency system that will help you pay less to keep your home comfortable over the next several years. Saving money and getting the best in HVAC systems may seem contradictory, but you actually can do both, especially right now!

Look for Special Deals

You can get systems like these on special deals from some companies, and you should always be on the lookout for specials on heating and cooling systems if you’re looking to replace yours anytime in the next year or two. These specials can really save you a ton of cash.

Get the Right Size

Buying the right size furnace or air conditioner is vital to saving money on your heating and cooling bills and on the actual equipment. Getting a bigger size isn’t always a better idea, as it can leave you with not only a more expensive system but also more expensive bills, since furnaces and air conditioners that are too large for the area they’re heating are generally much less efficient than furnaces and air conditioners of the right size.

 Apply for the Tax Credit

This is probably your biggest and best way to save on heating and cooling between now and the end of 2010. You can actually get a tax credit from the government when you buy new, energy-efficient appliances like furnaces and central air conditioners. Basically, this means that if you buy the right sort of HVAC equipment over the next year or so, you will be able to save a whole lot of money.

In order to get the credit, though, you have to buy the right kind of system. The kind you have to buy, though, is just the kind of energy-efficient system that will keep your heating and cooling bills as low as possible. The system that you’ll need to get will have to be at least 90% efficient, but this extra efficiency will save you money both now and later.

When you buy your new furnace or air conditioner – air source heat pumps and hot water boilers count, too – simply save both your receipt and the manufacturer’s certification for the appliance. Then, when you do your taxes – or have someone else do them – at the end of the year, you can take that receipt in and apply for the tax credit.

This credit, though, doesn’t work like a tax deduction, which only takes away a certain percentage of your taxable income. Instead, it’s basically like the government writes you a check; if you owe them money, they simply take the amount of the check away from the payment you owe, and if they owe you money, they’ll put that check in with the rest of your tax rebate.

You can get a rebate for 30% of the cost of your new appliances up to $15,000. The only time this doesn’t hold true is if you’re putting in super-efficient appliances that don’t need fossil fuels or natural gas to run. Geo-thermal heat pumps, for instance, have no dollar-amount limit, and the government will write you a check for 30% of the cost, no matter what it is.

There’s no doubt about it: air conditioning is expensive. Paying to keep your home environment cool all summer can take major chunks out of your bank account, but there are ways that you can alleviate this problem by using your energy more efficiently. Energy-efficient air conditioning isn’t just about buying a whole new system; it is also about learning to use the system that you have efficiently.

1.       Set the Thermostat High

It may seem uncomfortable to walk into a house that is only a few degrees cooler than the outside world, but running your air conditioner to shreds by setting your thermostat at seventy degrees all summer is ridiculous. Then you just end up needing to put on long sleeves and pull out blankets when you’re in the house, as your light, short summer clothes are uncomfortable then. Instead of having a freezing home, simply set your thermostat high and leave it up higher when no one is home during the day.

2.       Use a Dehumidifier

Most people know that dry heat is way easier to endure than humid heat, which is why many people in sunny, dry Arizona will walk around in the summer quite comfortable in long sleeves while people in Florida take off all the clothes they decently can, even when it’s ten degrees cooler than Phoenix. If you want to avoid running your air conditioner simply to pull humidity out of the air, get a couple of dehumidifiers for your home, which can seriously help the problem.

3.       Pull Out Hot Air

Trying to cool your home while firing up the stove and the oven can be a major annoyance. Using an exhaust fan can help this problem, but if you don’t have one of these over your stove, you can help cool your kitchen simply by setting up a fan on the floor. In conjunction with your air conditioner, this will help your kitchen stay comfortable even as you slave away.

4.       Shade When It’s Needed

You may already be aware that pulling the curtains over your south-facing windows on those hot summer days can make your home more comfortable by several degrees, but did you know that shading your air-conditioning unit can help it run more efficiently? If you get to choose where to put your A/C unit, you should place it on the shady north side of your home. If not, plant trees or tall grass around the unit, which can help it stay cooler, working more efficiently. Besides this, the plants will shade your home, keeping it naturally cooler, and hide the air conditioning unit from sight.

5.       Buy an Energy-Efficient Unit

If you’re really struggling to keep up with the electricity bills during the summer, it may be that you need a new air conditioning unit. Energy-efficient air conditioning when used in conjunction with all these other energy-saving ideas could help you cool your home more efficiently, and buying a new unit could very well save you hundreds of dollars a year.