How to Save on Your Energy Bill During the Summer Months

Summer bills up here are strange compared to the rest of Arizona. Flagstaff cools off at night, so the cooling load is real but not brutal — which means the usual advice about air conditioning only gets you part of the way. A lot of the summer increase in northern Arizona homes comes from things that run all day regardless of the weather.

Use the climate you actually have

Our overnight lows are the cheapest cooling available. Open the house up in the evening, close it in the morning before the sun gets on the west windows, and you can carry cool air well into the afternoon. Whole-house and ceiling fans make that strategy dramatically more effective for a fraction of the energy an air conditioner uses.

Ceiling fans should run counterclockwise in summer so they push air down. They cool people, not rooms — turning them off in empty rooms is free savings. If your fans are old, wobbling, or missing where you need them, our ceiling fan installation page covers bracing and switching options.

If you have a swamp cooler, maintain it

Evaporative cooling works genuinely well in our dry summers and costs a fraction of refrigerated air to run. It only works when the pads are clean and the water is circulating properly, and it needs a window or two cracked to move air through the house. A unit with scaled pads and a tired pump uses the same electricity to do much less.

Find what's running when nobody's home

Standby draw across a modern house — set-top boxes, game consoles, older desktops, a second refrigerator in the garage, a hot tub — routinely adds up to a meaningful share of the bill. Two things pay for themselves quickly:

• The garage refrigerator. An old second fridge working against summer garage heat can cost more per year than a new one costs to buy.
• Entertainment and office clusters. Smart plugs or a switched strip cut standby draw on a schedule without anyone remembering to do it.

Lighting, water heating, and the boring wins

If any incandescent or halogen bulbs are left, replacing them with LED cuts both the lighting energy and the heat they dump into the room. Outdoor and security lighting on photocells or timers stops the driveway from being lit at 11 a.m. And a water heater set to 120 degrees, with the first few feet of pipe insulated, is a quiet ongoing saving on a load that runs year-round.

Automate the parts you'll forget

The savings that stick are the ones nobody has to maintain. A programmable or smart thermostat, switches with schedules on the outdoor lighting, and smart plugs on the big standby offenders together handle most of what a diligent person would do manually — and they keep doing it in August when nobody's thinking about it. Our home automation installation page covers what integrates cleanly with existing wiring.