What can I do to help my air conditioner work more efficiently?

1. Maintain it. Have an air conditioning technician come to your home every spring before it gets too hot and check your system out. The earlier you catch a problem and repair it, the smaller than problem will remain.
   
2. Add insulation to your attic or crawlspace so hot air doesn’t get in the house. The warmer the home’s air, the harder the air conditioner has to work. The harder it works, the quicker it will wear out.
   
3. Make sure your unit is the right size. Bigger isn’t necessarily better when it comes to a/c. A room air conditioner that’s too big for the room it’s supposed to cool won’t operate as efficiently as a smaller one that’s the right size.
   
4. Install a whole-house fan. It will keep your home cool without using the air conditioner on days when the sun’s not too hot or overnight when the outside air is cooler than the inside air.
   
5. Install ceiling fans, or if you have them already, turn them on. Ceiling fans move the air so you’ll feel cooler, which will let you raise your thermostat a few degrees without noticing any difference in your comfort.

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For more information and for answers to all YOUR Landscape, Garden and Home Improvement questions, visit our website, Rosieonthehouse.com

20 ways to trim your energy bills!

You can turn your home into a more comfortable place to live—and turn your energy bills more manageable—by doing the simplest maintenance on your appliances, air conditioning system and even your faucets and windows.

     Here are 20 routine chores that can make a big difference. For some, you’ll need professional help. But you can do others yourself in a matter of minutes.

1. Turn twice-a-year maintenance on your air conditioning and heating system into a habit. A qualified air conditioner technician (or a plumber, if the furnace is gas-powered) will inspect cabinets, motors, fan blades, the control box, wiring, the blower assembly and other parts as needed, and alert you to any problems-in-the-making that you can take care of before they become disasters.
   
2. Turn off your air conditioner when you run your evaporative cooler—and vice versa. When you run them at the same time, you’ll actually waste energy because the two systems will compete with each other. The evap cooler works by adding moisture to the air, and the a/c works by removing it.
   
3. Turn the evap cooler off altogether when it’s wet outside. Once the dew point reaches 50 degrees or more, an evaporative cooler is not very effective. Tip: Remember the Rule of 140. If the temperature plus the dew point equals 140 or more, then don’t expect much out of your evap. If you have an a/c with a SEER rating of 12 or higher, then go ahead and turn it on.
   
4. Turn on your ceiling fans. Ceiling fans don’t cool the air; they move it around so the air in that room feels cooler. That means you can inch the thermostat up by three to four degrees without noticing a difference in your comfort.
   
5. Turn off your standard light bulbs. As they burn out, replace those energy-inefficient incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs. They use 75 percent less energy, so you can save $30 by replacing just one incandescent with a CFL.

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For answers to this and all of YOUR Landscape, Garden and Home Improvement questions, visit our website, Rosieonthehouse.com

What are the most common recommendations for energy efficiency by home performance specialists??

If you invite a home-performance specialist to your home to detect where it uses energy inefficiently, you’ll get some recommendations for repairs, upgrades and changes that will increase your home’s comfort and lower your gas and electric bills.   Here are four of the most common recommendations:

1. Seal the ducts. The ductwork in your attic has joints that can leak over time. In fact, SRP estimates that the typical Phoenix home loses 20 percent of its air-conditioned air through faulty ducts.   In some cases, installers use duct tape to prevent those leaks, but energy specialists say that’s not the most-effective solution. Instead, installers are double-sealing the joints, first with a super-sticky adhesive called Mastic, and then with a wrap of foil tape.

You can learn if your ducts need sealing by asking your air conditioning technician to inspect your ducts, or by having a home-performance audit that will reveal your home’s energy inefficiencies and recommend solutions.

2. Air-seal the house. When your house was built, the builder ran wires and plumbing plates through holes in the wall that are much bigger than the wires themselves. That extra space around the wires can let your expensive, air-conditioned indoor air leak outside—and invite hot, summer air inside.

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For more information and for answers to all YOUR Landscape, Garden and Home Improvement questions, visit our website, Rosieonthehouse.com