How do you use your air conditioning?

frenchyd said:

In reply to Ransom :

What I dislike about central air is the use of heat ducts.  Unlike heat which rises, cold air settles. The only way A/C works is to use a lot of extra energy to blow it up so it can settle back over the people in the room. 

Vertically speaking, which half of the room are you in? I'm about six feet tall and have eight foot ceilings. I spend my time in the bottom 3/4 of the room. The only exception I can think of is Lionel Richie.

In the end, hot or cold, it takes a bunch of energy to either cool or heat the air. I get the impression that this is rather more than the energy involved in blowing it around the house enough to keep the overall ambient temperature where you want it. I don't think we're going to get subscription-based, monthly-updated HVAC tech anytime soon, so we'll just have to accept that some of the time you're using suboptimal tech as a tradeoff for not expending time and money on a new system for a few years.

All of this is utterly worthwhile to me as compared to being hotter or colder than I wish to be.

My house is wood everything,  including the staircase in the pic. The humidity outside will create a week worth of problems after a night worth of open windows.  Ac is on may to September. 

Also,  ever since a heat exhaustion event in '04 I'm no good with the heat.  We just ordered a mini split heat pump system for my shop.

I only use mine when the temps threaten triple digits. It's it's below 95, the air is OFF.

I have my central air set to 79 degrees.  I can deal with that okay although the upstairs is a bit warmer than I would like (single thermostat downstairs, so it lives in cooler air).  Sometimes I'll open a window to let the heat out overnight when it's cooler.  I find that I can handle warmer temps when the humidity is lower, so leaving the windows shut and the temp in the room up by a few degrees is preferable.  

We live about halfway between Philly and Baltimore, in a house built in the early '60s.  Not awful, but not terribly well insulated by modern standards.  Windows are quality double hung insulated units about 8 years old.

In mid-March through mid-May and mid-September through October, we can usually get away without really running heat or AC, just the blower.  Any time outside temps are between about 60-70 and conditions are dry, we will have at least some windows open.  So that's maybe a total of 3 to 3-1/2 months out of the year where I'm not significantly conditioning the inside air at all.

In winter we set the stat to 68-70 during morning and evening hours, dropping back to 64 during work and sleep.  Summer we do 72-73 during occupied hours and let it go up to 75 for work or sleep.  If I set it any higher than that the upstairs bedrooms will hit the mid-80s during the afternoon.  The system will run continuously while failing to bring the house down from 78 to 72 between getting home at 6 and before bed at 11.  Ditto in the winter.  It's notably more efficient (cheaper) to hold 65-75 than it is to drag it back into range from lower or higher set points.

The programmable thermostat can be set to run the fan 0 / 15 / 45 / 60 minutes per hour, even when the heat or AC is off.  About 8-9 months of the year I have it run 15 minutes per hour, but in the summer I boost that to 45 minutes or even continusously when it's really hot and sunny.  The house is a Cape Cod and there is not much between the bedrooms and all that baking heat on nearly flat dormer roofs.  Plus, stirring the air up really helps equalize the temps since upstairs is almost always 10 dF warmer than downstairs in the summer.

Most of our rooms have high and low returns, with dampers on the low inlets.  In winter I open the dampers so it drags cool air in from the floor to be heated.  In the summer I close them so it pulls hot air off the ceiling to be cooled.

Our house, while older, does not flow air well at all due to the renovations (2) done to the original structure. Every room except the bathrooms has a ceiling fan to assist with air movement. Our a/c runs from May through Oct, serving both cooling and humidity control purposes. Our house is almost exclusively wood paneling inside, including the kitchen, so mold can definitely be an issue with the humidity we see here in NC.

Our system is set to a temp, and it figures out what it needs to do to keep it at that temp, be it heat or a/c. We have it set to be slightly warmer during the day when we are typically not home, and cooler during the times we are home in the summer. In the winter it's cooler when we aren't home. We do try not to adjust the settings too much to be as economical as possible, but sometimes it's just berkeleying hot and you need it to be 70° inside. I also turn into a furnace in the middle of the night, so the ceiling fan in the bedroom is usually on the hurricane setting.

I got allergies.  Windows open equals asthma..  So AC or heat year round...

The window unit in my bedroom gets turned on 2 hours before I go to bed just to take the edge off. It shuts itself off before I go upstairs. For the first time pretty much ever I've been using AC during the day.

I hate the noise of an air conditioner, so I always avoided them, but when we built the downstairs bedroom we put in a through the wall hotel style unit, and that gets run throughout the day. It's enough to keep the temp and humidity down in the main part of the house, without being loud and annoying.

I still don't use it in my vehicles because it doesn't fixing work. Someday I'll have another car with working AC, only took me 13 years of driving to get the first one. 

On all the time, windows shut.  Humidity control even more than temp control.  It doesn't get ultra hot and humid in WI, not for very long anyways, so it doesn't run a lot, it's just on.  I have a couple older violins that don't like humidity swings, printing filament doesn't like humidity, I personally hate humidity and turn into a sweaty pile of flubber and rage, etc...  I'm fine with the cold, though.  If my wife was ok with it I'd heat the place to 60 tops in the winter.  She likes it 75 though, so we compromise and set it at 75.

In the Summer it's too hot to be comfortable without A/C.  In the Winter, it's too cold to be comfortable without heat.  Every once in a while, in the Spring and in the Fall, a perfect day might come along that would make it possible to be comfortable with the windows open, but really, who has time for that E36 M3?  Our home is climate controlled and the windows are never open.

My house is small, on top of a hill and has a large tree shading the living room so most of the summer I get away with open windows and ceiling fans in every room.  On days it will be hot I close the windows and set the two large window acs on 70.  Once the house is cool they usually don’t work too hard until to outside temp hits 100.

We have two Ecobee thermostats connected to a single central HVAC unit with two ducted supply zones (1,700sf ranch main level and basement). The basement zone runs infrequently but the return air pulls from both zones whenever the system runs and that keeps the air pretty well filtered.

We keep it cold at night, around 68 and the system is programmed to maintain about 80 during the day when we're away, about 74 when were home and awake. . 85 when we are on vacation - just to control humidity.

It's so fookin' humid here the windows rarely get opened unless we really burn something in the oven. 

We have the thermostat  set for a range of 70 to 78.  Used to be 68 to 78 but we are getting older.  We have been using those ranges for ~20 years since we retired and are home most of the time.  If the outside temps are within that range, we will open some windows and close them when either the heat or the AC comes on.

Wally said:

My house is small, on top of a hill and has a large tree shading the living room so most of the summer I get away with open windows and ceiling fans in every room.  On days it will be hot I close the windows and set the two large window acs on 70.  Once the house is cool they usually don’t work too hard until to outside temp hits 100.

I have much the same, with the added advantage of a lake at the bottom of my little hill.  Cool lake air is blown up into open windows by the breeze or wind . On the lake  side off the house the bottom half is open. On the street side the top half is open. 

Cool air enters at the bottom forcing hot air out the top.making thermodynamics work for me.  It can actually get a little too cool on an 80 degree day

Some of you make  me feel really cheap...

Summer, usually set to 78, but commonly bumped down to 76 if we are moving around the house. If we are away, up to 81.  may be changing the standard setting to 76 with the new baby. 

Winter, set to 68, if we are away, 64.  if we want more heat, we use oil filled electric heaters to heat the room we are in. 

We use the AC early and often. We don't open windows. The only time the weather supports that tends to be pollen heavy times and that does not go over well.