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We keep the thermostat at 74 most of the day - 75 or 76 when we are going to be gone for the day or longer and 72 at night and when I am cleaning the house - running up and down the stairs cleaning. We have a 1 1/2 story house with an upstairs landing (large) that connects all the bedrooms/bathrooms/closets - no vents at all on the landing and heat rises. We keep the fans on in the upstairs bedrooms but it is still a bit warmer up there than downstairs - typically the walk-out basement is freezing.
Our Florida home is 4 years old. I had all the new "available" upgrades added to our home construction. We upgraded our insullation to R30 ceiling and walls, still our home gets warm. A/C is 16 SEER with a friendly auto thermostat.. Our builder would not allow us to use an insulated double pane window which we had in Pennsylvania but we are soon getting the film installed over our windows and doors....
We do have a solar hot water heater that saves us around 30% in total electricity costs and we have a swimming pool solar heater set at 90 degrees. We tried to reduce our electric costs and will not be uncomfortable. The extras were a lot of dough but we are still looking to reduce our current electric bills of $245-340 a month. We have a 2,800 SF home on one floor and our roof is vented to around 90% of our total roof space.
A grid of installed solar panels on our roof would run $30,000 and is only guaranteed for 140 mph winds and 15 years so the payback is too long. I called FP+L when we were getting our home built and discovered at that time they do not buy back electricity... So if we didn't use all of solar generated electricity on any given day we just couldn't sell it to someone who could use it.
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Wow, and to think we were considering solar panels for our FL home as well. 30K and up to 140mph winds? If they could rate to 165mph it may be worth the trouble seeing how there is SO MUCH SUN here.
Your elect bill is high. Our home is a yr old, 2650 sq ft w/ 14 ton seer AC unit and we only pay around 80 a month during the summer. Granted we've got 4 zone climate control too but we keep our thermostat @ 80 when away and 79 when we're in the house using our ceiling fans. I believe a big part of our bill being so low is due to the 4 zone system we have and only using it in the room we're in. Can't imagine heating or cooling a whole house if you don't have to. The European's got that right w/ shutters and individual cooling sectors.
When we use the ac we set our thermostat on 78 degrees in the summer and in the winter we have it at 56 degrees when we're at work, 72 degrees when we get home, and down to 68 degrees when we're sleeping. You cannot believe how much money you can save doing this.
We live in the Southern California lower desert aka HOT. Can't do without a/c here. Fall and spring, could make due with evap cooler but sometimes the humidity gets a little high in the summer and a swamp cooler just won't cut it.
I like to keep the temp set at about 76-77 when home, might set it to 78 if we are going to be going out for a while, but in this heat it takes too long to cool so just leave it. I like sleeping in a cool house, hubby prefers a little warmer, keep it at about 76 for sleeping. If I were home alone I would set that sucker down...
Life is too short to be too hot or too cold. We decided years ago that if we have the a/c we are going to use it.
We keep the thermostat at 74 most of the day - 75 or 76 when we are going to be gone for the day or longer and 72 at night and when I am cleaning the house - running up and down the stairs cleaning.
I do pretty much the same thing and I just live in a smaller apartment (1100 sq ft) in Florida.. It just gets so hot and humid outside that walking into a COLD room is wonderful. I hate having to close all the shutters for most of the day just because it is so hot outside.
It is bad enough to have to keep the AC on in the car for a couple of minutes before I can touch the steering wheel.
BigJon3475 thanks.... Our home gets warm when my wife cooks in the mid afternoons on a 95-98 degree day with 80+ humidity. I should have said that in the beginning but our PA home never got warm regardless of what we did because we had a new complete heating and A/C unit installed, double pane windows with 3/4 inch of gas filled spaces. The windows were higher rated than the ones we now have in Florida and our Florida homes does have a lot of leaks including 10' cathedrel ceilings with glass as high....
Our windows are single pane including the 4- 6' wide sliding doors. Our builder in Florida did not permit a change of glass types when we hired them to build our home so we knew our electric would probably be higher than it should.... We have a single 50k BTU using 16SEER unit that is considered by those in the trade as a "very good unit". Our home air flow is excellent and no restrictions or deficiencies have been located and our lines are fully charged.
Our bedroom areas home are broken up between (left and right side of home) 2 sides of our total square footage under air and I guess I should have gone with 2 zones each being high efficiency units. We have 5 walk-in closets and each have A/C ducts which is now code. I even researched about buying an array of solar photovoltaic panels to reduce our power consumption. It is very expensive to mount what we need and our cost could be as high as $85,000 that will take care of 70-85% of our power consumption....Our final cost excluding Federal and Florida solar refunds would be $64,000 and PAYBACK WOULD BE 15 YEARS. The electric company determined that our average bill nowadays would be $304 a month giving us a savings of around $240 a month. I come up with a total 15 year savings of our curent electric of only $43,200 so we also need to see how they got a savings of $64,000....
I and our A/C guy now believes that our 12- 4ft by 3ft single pane windows and our 4 single pane sliding doors are the major loss of cooling. Makes sense to take care of the single panes first then we should be better able to judge our further cooling needs. Our friends newer home is smaller and has a reflective film over their few windows. Their home is 1,600 SF under air and they set their home A/C thermostat at 77 degrees. We do think their home is cool so we need to do further investigation on our A/C in our home.
BigJon3475 thanks.... Our home gets warm when my wife cooks in the mid afternoons on a 95-98 degree day with 80+ humidity. I should have said that in the beginning but our PA home never got warm regardless of what we did because we had a new complete heating and A/C unit installed, double pane windows with 3/4 inch of gas filled spaces. The windows were higher rated than the ones we now have in Florida and our Florida homes does have a lot of leaks including 10' cathedrel ceilings with glass as high....
Our windows are single pane including the 4- 6' wide sliding doors. Our builder in Florida did not permit a change of glass types when we hired them to build our home so we knew our electric would probably be higher than it should.... We have a single 50k BTU using 16SEER unit that is considered by those in the trade as a "very good unit". Our home air flow is excellent and no restrictions or deficiencies have been located and our lines are fully charged.
Our bedroom areas home are broken up between 2 sides of our total square footage under air and I guess I should have gone with 2 zones each being high efficiency units. We have 5 walk-in closets and each have A/C ducts which is now code. I even researched about buying an array of solar photovoltaic panels to reduce our power consumption. It is very expensive to mount what we need and our cost could be as high as $85,000 that will take care of 70-85% of our power consumption....Our final cost excluding Federal and Florida solar refunds would be $64,000 and PAYBACK WOULD BE 15 YEARS. The electric company determined that our average bill nowadays would be $304 a month giving us a savings of around $240 a month. I come up with a total 15 year savings of our curent electric of only $43,200 so we also need to see how they got a savings of $64,000....
I and our A/C guy now believes that our 12- 4ft by 3ft single pane windows and our 4 single pane sliding doors are the major loss of cooling. Makes sense to take care of the single panes first then we should be better able to judge our further cooling needs. Our friends newer home is smaller and has a reflective film over their few windows. Their home is 1,600 SF under air and they set their home A/C thermostat at 77 degrees. We do think their home is cool so we need to do further investigation on our A/C in our home.
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Windows would be a big help. If your HVAC guy knows how to do load calculations he can tell you how much heat gain each is adding to your home. With that high of a humidity I would look into whole house dehumidifier. HVAC systems remove the latent heat (humidity) before they start to remove the sensible. Water has a specific heat of 1 while dry air (which doesn't exsist on earth in a natural form) has a specific heat of .24. What that means is it takes 1 btu to raise 1 lb of water 1°F. Air takes only .24 btu to raise the tempeture of 1 lb of air 1°F. Your A/C will do much better at cooling if it doesn't have to fight as much latent heat. Being in Florida it's almost a requirement to have a dehumidifier. You'll be able to raise the temp. of the thermostat and still feel comfortable if you can drop the relative humidity. Your HVAC guy is 100% correct in saying the envelope should always be addressed first before any drastic changes are made. Why pay to dry and cool a home with leaks that allow more than the standard air exchange rate of 25% of the volume of your home in 1 hour. This is a requirement to purge the pollutants that are caused by humans. A data logging of CO2 in your home and the outside of your home can give you a pretty accurate idea of how much your home really leaks. Good luck.
edit: I forgot to mention the larger the return the slower the air is that moves across the evaporator coil. The longer it can "hang" in the evaporator coil the more moisture it can remove. In reality it's only milliseconds but there is much data proving this to be true.
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