There are just so many changes that have happened in just a year.
It’s hard to believe that we are headed into our second spring in this house.
But at least, I have a much better understanding of how to get the cooling comfort we need without huge utility bills. This was a lesson I learned toward the end of last spring. My wife and I have never lived anywhere but in the city. That meant living in apartments with varying states of HVAC. Normally, we’d have radiant heating for the winter and then put in window air conditioners during the summer. This worked but it wasn’t actually ideal. We moved out of the city and onto a 20 acre plot of land last year. But we really didn’t know much about how to go about the heating and cooling of our new house. Since we didn’t have any neighbors for the first time in our lives, we didn’t feel like it made any sense to put up window coverings. We loved having the views and having all this privacy but that all changed once we got into May. It gets really hot here pretty quick and I had no idea the effect of direct sunlight heating on the efficiency of an HVAC unit. But let me tell you, it’s pretty drastic. I thought there was something wrong with the HVAC equipment so I called the HVAC company. The HVAC unit was brand new so there wasn’t a problem with it. It was a problem for us. Now we have solar shades that mitigate the direct sunlight heating and our utility bills are quite reasonable these days.