How Your Ceiling Fan Can Save You Cool Cash on Your Summer Electric Bill

Summer's here, and as temperatures soar, so will your electric bills. However, if you have one or more ceiling fans in your home, using them along with your air conditioning can help you to conserve energy and reap you substantial savings. Here's how.

The cooling effect of a ceiling fan can make a room feel up to 10 degrees cooler. So, if you have your ceiling fan running, and then crank up your air conditioning thermostat 5 degrees to 7 degrees, you would still be just as cool and comfortable. And for each degree that you raise your thermostat, you save 7 percent to 10 percent on cooling costs. This can add up to a cool bundle of savings.

Say, for example, it is 85 degrees in a room. If you turn on the ceiling fan and turn up the AC thermostat to 90 degrees, you would still enjoy the same comfort level as you had with only the air conditioning. This is primarily how the energy savings kick in.

Ceiling fans are also extremely efficient, consuming 90 % less energy than air conditioning. A ceiling fan uses about as much energy as a 100-watt light bulb, so it costs just pennies a day to operate. When you compare this to more than 50cts per hour for air conditioning, you can see how the savings begin to add up. In fact, studies show that ceiling fans can save you up to 25 to 40 percent on your summer cooling costs.

It takes two
It is important to keep in mind that you gain the energy savings by running both the air conditioning and the ceiling fan/s at the same time.

This is because a ceiling fan does not actually reduce the temperature in a room; it makes a room feel cooler by helping the body's own cooling system work more effectively. Like a gentle breeze on a hot day, the fan creates a "wind chill effect" as it moves air against your skin, and this cools your body in two ways:

*Firstly, Your body heat warms the air right next to your skin. The light breeze that the fan creates blows away this warm layer of air, leaving you feeling like someone pulled a blanket off of you.

*Secondly, the perspiration on your skin absorbs your body heat, and cools the body as it evaporates. The fan breeze facilitates this natural process by increasing the body's rate of evaporation.

So keep in mind that ceiling fans cool people; they do not cool rooms. Save yourself some cool cash this summer by supplementing your Air Conditioning with your ceiling fan/s. And do not leave the fans running when there is no one in the room.