Air Conditioning Myths Exposed
By: Julie Musgrave
Updated: July 17, 2008
You leave the house for 8, 9 hours a day. It seems perfectly logical to just turn you’re A/C off while you're gone to save some money, right?
Unfortunately, it's actually the other way around.
Air conditioning technicians say that by turning your air off, you're actually increasing the amount of work it has to do to stay cool. All that heat kind of collects in your home while you're away, so that when you come home and turn it back on -- it's got to run a lot longer and harder in order to catch up and cool things down.
Another trick some people try is to turn their air off, but leave the fan running.
The theory is that the fan will keep the air circulating, and therefore keep the room cool.
Well... unfortunately, that's false too.
Mark Williams, Gibson’s: “Obviously when the fan's running and the air conditioner's not, you're just circulating the air that's in the house and the blower motor actually takes power. So by turning your fan on and leaving it running 24 hours a day is actually costing you more money.”
Williams says that a programmable system is the best way to go. You can program your
system to automatically raise and lower temperatures.
So you leave with comfortable... and you come home comfortable.
You'll never know the difference.
