And we’re going to keep the inside only 15 degrees cooler than the outside throughout the summer
When we retired down south, the heat and humidity weren’t exactly a shock. We knew for sure that June through September came with a lot of heat. But there is a difference between knowing something as a fact and experiencing it. So the first few summers, we just poured on the HVAC cooling. It was really all that we felt we could do in order to manage this sort of heat and humidity. However, all that air conditioning doesn’t come cheap. While I was glad to be free of the HVAC heating costs once we moved down here, I was running up big HVAC cooling bills now. And that seemed pretty counter intuitive to me. The HVAC heating up north where we lived and raised a family was essential to survival. While we tried to cut costs and prepare the house in order to save on HVAC heating costs, you simply had to have it. Well, that’s true down here but to a lesser degree. Of course, through the summer down here without air conditioning would be foolish and could prove to be quite dangerous as well. But, we were using so much HVAC cooling that we weren’t adjusting to the heat at all. So this year, we’re changing that behavior. We didn’t go right for the thermostat to flip to air conditioning once the temperatures started rising this spring. And we’re going to keep the inside only 15 degrees cooler than the outside throughout the summer. This will keep the HVAC cooling costs down significantly while allowing us to truly acclimate to our new environment.