Home Cooling

Keeping your home cool and comfortable can be easy and inexpensive. But, as with all efficiency improvements, it's important to prioritize. Starting with the cheapest, easiest measures will give you the most bang for the buck — and will reduce or even eliminate the need for more expensive cooling methods.

The first, most important, and most often overlooked step is to relearn the lost art of natural passive cooling. These include the use of shade trees, awnings, blinds, light-colored or reflective roof and wall surfaces, heat-blocking window films (which needn't block visible light), insulation, draft-proofing, cooling vents, attic radiant barriers, and more efficient indoor lighting and appliances (which reduce the amount of waste heat generated inside the home).

Having maximized passive cooling techniques, tackle the remaining heat with mechanical cooling equipment — that is, fans and evaporative ("swamp") coolers. These devices use energy, but they use less of it than air conditioners, which employ the very energy-intensive process of refrigeration. (Evaporative coolers don't work well in humid climates, however.)

If you've done all the above, you may find you don't need air conditioning at all. But if you still do, there are things you can do to operate your air conditioning system more efficiently, such as sealing and insulating central ductwork, cleaning filters every month and coils and fins every year, and having the refrigerant charge checked periodically.

If you're in the market for a new air conditioning system, make it an efficient one. Air conditioning is expensive to operate — on average, it accounts for 22 percent of the electricity bill for households that have it — so efficient equipment can save lots of money in the long run.

Check with your state energy office or your electric utility to see if they offer rebates for implementing any of the above techniques.

• American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy — lots of useful information, including publications such as The Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings.
  
• Southface Energy Institute — information on efficient building techniques, especially relevant to hot climates.
  
• Florida Solar Energy Center — information on solar and energy-efficient homes, chiefly in hot, humid climates.