If you're lucky enough to live in a house with air conditioning, you'll know how much electricity the damn thing uses. Let's talk thermodynamics! Put a big fan in the top floor of your house, facing the window. At night, open the window, turn the fan on full blast facing OUT. Now open a window in the lowest room in your house. All the hot air gets sucked out and replaced with cool night air, and you won't need to run the AC tomorrow unless it's a REAL scorcher. The fan uses WAY less juice.

While on the subject of fans - fans don't cool down a room, they cool down humans. AC motors are very efficient, but they still generate heat. Heat that you then have to get rid of somehow, which will probably cost you more money. Running a fan in a room you're not in costs you money for uselessly running a fan, and MORE money to get rid of the heat it creates. Treat fans like they're lights, and turn them off when you leave the room.

@ifixcoinops hi stranger. I just moved into an attic that supposedly gets extremely hot / cold depending on the season. No a/c, two windows on opposite sides of the room, and a fan. Whats your suggestion for best setup?

@xvu investigate the insulation situation, see if there's room for more / better attic insulation. That's priority #1. Otherwise, same applies - blow the hot air out at night, suck the cold air in, try to preserve cold air in your attic during the day. During winter, leave the door at your staircase open whenever you're around, so heat from the house comes into your space.

@ifixcoinops awesome will absolutely try that. It hasn't been unbearable the last few nights but I can tell how stuffy it has the potential to get

If you have cats or other furred or feathered creatures in your house, remember that fans can't cool down insulated creatures that don't sweat. This may be one of the situations in which to use the air conditioning.

Your car, if it was made in the last 20-odd years (and if it wasn't - good for you!), has an OBD2 port located in an easy-to-access location. You can buy a Bluetooth OBD2 reader online for about a tenner, and plug that into your port. You can then get the Android app "Torque," which if your phone is suitably mounted can give you an instant miles-per-gallon readout. Simply having that Shame Number visible will make you change your driving habits to be more efficient.

I've got all sorts of other tips (my house uses half of what a typical American house uses and it's not, like, a fancy house or anything, it's very ordinary) but for now I'm going to sleep, because going to sleep when it's dark and getting up when it's light means you use less electricity on lighting. Also makes you feel better. :)

@ifixcoinops when it's too hot and I know I don't need to leave the house for the next few hours I just make my shirt wet. It's pretty easy and cools you down
(i recommend switching to dry clothes in the evening again as this wet shirt has an effect on your body thermo regulation and that's not good for sleep).

Also, wet blankets over windows are recommendee by some (wind goes by and gets cooled of by this)

@saxnot This is a good tip. In general, "cool the people, not the room," because cooling the people is the desired end result. Cooling your wrists down, or any place where your blood is close to the outside air anyway, works really well too.

@ifixcoinops it works also the other way around: warm the people and not the room during winter times :)

@ifixcoinops
Too that I'll add "throw away those horrible fake leather sofa. You can't sit on it during summer without sticking to it". But then...
@saxnot

@ifixcoinops @saxnot
Hmm... much typos...

@ifixcoinops
My home is one floor of greenhouse...

@eladhen Are you a sunflower? ;) The opening-windows-at-night thing still stands, but it's much better if you have the highest window and the lowest window open. One trick I learned in my previous house with no A/C was a fan in front of a bowl of cold water - I actually took it a little further and used a fishtank pump, some copper tubing and a polystyrene beer cooler full of ice water to make a crude but efficient A/C unit for parties. I'll try to find some pictures.

@ifixcoinops
All of my windows are the same height and facing the same (southern, hence the greenhouse) direction. I guess I'll stick with AC for now...

@ifixcoinops Georgia is pretty binary with its weather. Generally it's hot enough to need the very efficient heat pump, too cold to open the windows, or raining too hard to have them open.

I can see this advice being useful in a place with seasons though.

@Riley As always YMMV - but if you've got a heat pump / heat exchanger installed, you're already doing very well, energy-efficiency-wise. :)

@ifixcoinops They're standard in this climate! Most are undersized due to the corner-cutting in the housing boom, but still.

@ifixcoinops

And if possible, put the intake fan on the north side of the house (south in southern hemisphere) to take advantage of the shade.

@ifixcoinops Suggestions for single-story-dwellers? (Apartments, Flats, etc…)?

@pludikovsky See my other posts re: building an evaporative cooling fan thing. Opening windows at night still works, just not as well because heat will want to get up near your ceiling.

@ifixcoinops More of this!

Why are we still so thermodynamically impaired, have crazy complex algorithms for serving *ads* and a lot of pathetically dumb systems for controlling one of the most power hungry aspect of our life.

It doesn't help that some people still cannot understand a simple
thermostat.

@ifixcoinops I am less than confident about the night-fan trick. My parents' house has AC on a schedule, so it's not on at the times that nobody's home. It's cool in the morning and evening, but if someone gets home early during the summer it's hot, even though it was fine in the morning. This leaves me uncertain of any plan based on cooling the house at the start of the day and hoping the temperature persists until the next sunset.

@qwertystop YMMV obviously.

@ifixcoinops pro tip. You may not even need a fan. Just open all the Windows for 10 minutes at nicht (Lights off so as not to attract insects)

@ifixcoinops I really don't like air conditioning. It makes me feel like I'm hanging out in a fridge, and when I go outside, the transition to the ambient temp is sudden, and overwhelming. If I don't use AC, it's usually a little cooler out than in (in the shade anyway), which is a nice feeling. I'm not an alien, and I don't need life support tech to live on #Earth ;-P

@ifixcoinops More people need to hear this. A second-hand computer running a Unix-like OS is almost certainly JUST FINE for most people.

Problem is, running your own Unix means you gotta be your own sysadmin, and most people are like "ain't nobody got time for that".

@starbreaker In my experience (Ubuntu and Ubuntu Mate) stuff just works. No messing around with trying to find drivers, no maintenance, no malware. Yes, you can really screw up an Ubuntu installation if you mess around under the hood without knowing what you're doing - but Windows will really screw *itself* up unless you know *exactly* what you're doing.

@ifixcoinops Glad to hear it. I had better/more successful experiences with #OpenBSD, but that might be a matter of having the right mindset and expectations.

@ifixcoinops @starbreaker Lubuntu, powering my parents and grandparents 14 year old desktops. I think the user experience is even smoother then when they were running XP. 😜

@ifixcoinops There’s a huge knowledge gap when it comes to things like this. In the old days, you had to be somewhat savvy to use a computer, but most people today don’t really grasp how powerful and capable even their “old” computers really are

Proprietary bloat and rubbish apps don’t help. But most people stick with whatever came with the computer. They either don’t have the time or the capacity to learn something else

@ifixcoinops I still love my 10-year-old Mac Pro, although it’s stuck a couple OS versions back. It does all the stuff it was made to do admirably well. (Chews up & spits out Logic Pro like it was Text Edit) I do have to keep up with Adobe because of bad career choices- I wonder how long they’ll support 10.11.

@Devils_Rancher @ifixcoinops

If it's a PowerPC mac pro, that might be one of the few cases where getting a new pc might be a good idea. iirc the 2014 mac minis have more processing power at around half the energy usage as the last generation PPC Mac Pros.

@Devils_Rancher @ifixcoinops

+ you can generally find them for around $300 on ebay

@rdh @ifixcoinops it’s not a G5 - it’s an Intel.

@ifixcoinops Well said. I'm always happy with a second hand computer. Nothing better than getting a computer someone else thinks is too old and crap and doing more with it than they do with a newer computer.