Energy Efficient Homes: How to keep your home cool.
While we are still grappling with a bitter cold winter, summer will be here before we know it. Time to prepare our homes to be as energy efficient as possible for the coming summer heat.
Just as it’s important to keep warm air in during the winter, keeping the heat out is just as important to running an energy efficient home.
Ways to Keep Your Home Cool:
Cool Roofs – The biggest source of heat obviously comes from the sun. While the sun can be a good thing for solar panels on your roof, it is not a good thing for keeping out the heat from absorbing through your roof.
Not only that, but excessive heat is NOT good for solar panels either. So, if you have solar panels on your roof, you need to keep them cool.
Cool roofs have mostly been used on commercial buildings, but are slowly making their way into the residential sector.
Some Cool Roof Links:
So, a cool roof is an excellent way to keep out the heat from the outside, but what about the inside?
The solution?
Energy Efficient Light Bulbs – Most people just think that Fluoresecent light bulbs only use less energy, which is correct (not to mention last up to 5 years long!), however, the biggest advantage to these little puppies is that that don’t emit as much heat as regualar incandescent bulbs. In fact incandescent bulbs waste 90% of their energy on the heat rather than on lighting! This is a major factor heating element inside the home.
Getting rid of these heat generators will cut down on the temperature inside your home, which will in turn cut down on your AC bills.
Another options besides Fluorescent lighting is LED (Light Emitting Diodes) lighting. LEDs are even more energy efficient than fluorescent bulbs and last up to 10 times longer!
Learn more about Energy Efficient Lighting at www.environmentallights.com.
Help keep your home cool this summer and keep your home energy costs down.
Filed under: Energy Efficient Cooling | Tagged: cooling your home, cut back on home cooling, energy efficiency, Energy Efficient Cooling, energy efficient homes, energy efficient lighting, Fluorescent Light Bulbs, home energy, home energy savings, ideas to cool your home, LED
[...] Cool Ideas To Cool Your Home « Energy Efficient Homes Made Easy [...]
We live in the Southwest where electricity is super expensive and it can get hot. We switched to LEDs for a lot of our lighting and saved a lot on our electric bill. We rarely use our AC, but using LEDs makes it just that much cooler and more pleasant in our house without AC.
LEDs can be expensive, but they are coming down in price a lot. I don’t recommend buying your LEDs from Costco or Sam’s Club/Price club etc.. Those LEDs are very low light and weak and we didn’t like them at all.
Shop around online. I get all my LEDs from a site called Eaglelight (.com) becuase they have a great selection, excellent prices and best of all, a 100% money back guarantee. That way, I can try different LEDs and find the best ones for my house. I really like the Pharox, the VIVID 36LEDs, and the PAR bulbs like the PAR30 and PAR38 .
Eaglelight also sells a multi color LED light that has a remote and can change colors through 12 colors. IT’s awesome!
GOod luck to you with your house too.
[...] allow occupants to control brightness and glare as well. If there is a need for man-made light, energy efficient lighting fixtures and motion-activated controls were [...]
hmm.. good one )