We know you may be wondering how a ceiling fan can possibly help cool you off at all when temperatures are already soaring over 80°F and humidity levels are at a point that you need your dehumidifier running on a daily basis. Chances are, you’re running your air conditioner just as often.
But what if there was a simple way you could possibly reduce your chances of needing a premature air conditioning repair in Boynton Beach, FL, and boosting your AC efficiency? A professionally installed ceiling fan can do the trick! Keep in mind, ceiling fans also have the potential to hurt your energy usage, if not used the right way—which we’ll get to later on in this post.
How Fans Help the Cooling Process
You probably already know that fans help with cooling. There’s a fan within your air conditioner, after all, that helps with this process. Of course, that fan alone doesn’t keep you cool, and a ceiling fan doesn’t have the power to do this on its own either. Your air conditioning system has a number of components that work together to bring down the temperature in the warmer months. These components include:
- Refrigerant, which transfers heat from inside your home and expels it outdoors.
- The indoor coil, which absorbs heat and cools down.
- A compressor, which adds pressure to the refrigerant to enable it to do its job.
Without each of these parts working together to complete their jobs, all a fan can do by itself is recycle warm, stale air that already exists in your living space. A fan is not capable of doing anything except move air around. So, why are we still talking about it, and how does it help with AC efficiency? Well, because when used in combination with your HVAC system, moving air around is all it needs to do.
Supplement Your Cooling with Ceiling Fans
Ceiling fans enable your air conditioner to do a better job of evenly distributing conditioned air throughout your home. They are highly effective, since they spread out the cool air you’re already enjoying from your cooling system. This helps the system shut off sooner, which is where efficiency comes in. Your air conditioner won’t have to work as hard to do its job over the course of the summer season, and therefore you’ll see a decrease in your cooling bills.
As we stated above, ceiling fans alone can’t bring the temperature down in your home. They help you feel cooler, though. This is because they help sweat evaporate from your body with ease, which is how you cool off naturally. This is why we always feel cooling if we’re standing in front of or directly under a fan.
Supplement Your Heating, Too
We have very mild winters in our part of the country—that goes without saying. Still, though, our nights get chilly and for the short time our humidity drops, they feel even chillier. We know you don’t want to spend a lot on your heating efforts when you’ve spent 9 months or more paying for your air conditioner usage.
The good news is, the same concept of ceiling fans we explained above can help with your forced-air heater too—simply by flipping a switch located near the center of the fan and reversing the direction of the fan blades.
When Ceiling Fans Hurt Your Energy Usage
Ceiling fans are very beneficial, but sometimes homeowners use them the wrong way. The fact of the matter is, as we alluded to above, ceiling fans are only effective at bringing down the temperature when paired with an air conditioner, and cooling you off when you are in the room. If the room is unoccupied, there is literally no need to run the ceiling fan, and, as a result, you’ll be wasting energy.
Contact Envirotech Air Quality Services today for more great expert efficiency tips and exceptional HVAC services!
