Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.
This has never been more true for me than this past year.
Due to the pandemic, our wonderful zone controlled HVAC offices were shut down for the year. The company hung on with layoffs and salary reduction. I was lucky to just have to deal with a pay cut and working from home in the air conditioning. However, the pay cut was substantial enough to get me to face something that I have been needing to face for a long time. The fact of the matter is that I’ve been overpaying for HVAC cooling for far too long. And that is due to the fact that I’ve just never been willing to fully commit to saving as much as possible when it comes to air conditioning. The pandemic pay cut kicked me into high gear on that issue. And it really didn’t take an awful lot for me to do what I needed to do to save on air conditioning. The first order of business was to replace all of the weather stripping on the doors, sliders and windows. A tight house is so vital to helping the HVAC equipment be as efficient as possible. Then, it was on to mitigating any direct sunlight heating. That was pretty easy as we just made sure that window with direct sun got covered every day. Finally, it was the thermostat setting. This took a bit of getting accustomed to but it wasn’t that bad. We definitely allowed the house to heat up far more during the day. But in the end, we saved hundreds of dollars over just one summer on HVAC cooling costs.