| An Unusual Air Conditioning Idea. Help stop Global Warming! Ideas to Help Cool Your House in Summer By Susan Farmer Home Here is one energy saving idea that is pretty cool. This will help air condition one room with very little cost. What you do is buy an insulated cooler (try to by the type that holds food cold for 5 days or longer and put Blue Ice or similar or gel type containers frozen in the bottom of the cooler. Also just freezing gallon size water containers and placing them in the bottom of the cooler works just as well. Or Any thing that can be frozen. Then take a six inch fan and put on top of the cooler with the cooler lid open. Place the fan at one end of the cooler so that the air is flowing downward and moving over the frozen items in the bottom of the cooler. And wallah! What you have coming out of the other end of the cooler is cool air and quite a bit of it! This basic idea can also be used when you are camping! Just get a battery operated fan to use. You can use it in your tent or car or just wherever you are sitting. If you don't have ice or frozen blue ice, use the cold water from the lake or river and put that in the bottom of your cooler. Remember this method is only safe to use with a battery operated fan. And I wouldn't use the water idea at all with children around. Now, what I have discovered is that one of the best ways to keep your house cool is to VENT. I live in a two story house and it is always it seems like twenty degrees hotter upstairs than downstairs. Now I have always tried to figure out ways to keep my house cool without raising up the air conditioning cost and expense of running the air conditioner. The best way to vent a two story house is to open a window that is directly at the top of and directly in front of the stairs. That is the best window to use. If you don't have a window in the above position, then open a different window and use fans to move the air to the open window. Another idea you can use with the window idea is to turn on your bathroom fan in the upstairs and just keep it on. It helps vent some of the really hot air out. You can also point fans toward the bathroom to help a little more. If you have a window in the upstairs bathroom I would open that also. Another idea that sometimes help in a small area is to buy a round gel filled item that can be frozen. After it is frozen, with a shoestring tie it to the top of your fan so that the gel part hits the fan in about the middle. Yes! You have cooler air! You can sometimes find such an item in catalogs such as. Now if you have money and can install AWHOLE HOUSE FAN that is a great alternative to air conditioning. Basically it is a very large fan that sits at the top of your house and when you turn it on it basically sucks all the hot air out of your house in one fell swoop! A fan cost starts at about $200 and goes up from there. You do need to have a contractor put it in and help you decide the best place to put it. A swamp cooler is a great idea also. I saw one put in the ceiling of a one story and it worked like a dream. Another idea is to use vines, trees, bushes and plants to shade the outside of your House. This method can bring down the temperature in your house by as much as twenty degrees. With global warming on the rise, I hope that this information helps some. Oh I almost forgot, I signed up for Climate Smart. It is a program with my electric company, PG&E, that tracks my carbon footprint. They calculate how much my household contributes to global warming and then I pay a small fee of about $5 A month and the electric company then invests that money into erasing my carbon footprint by planting trees and other projects. I personally feel a little better About helping the environment and doing a tiny part to help reduce global warming. You could inquire to see if your utility company has something similar. Warm Regards, Susan Farmer |