Summer without air-conditioning

Before I came to Texas, I heard from loads of friends that the weather here is similar to India. But what they didn't tell me was that the weather here resembled Delhi's and not Bangalore's. Coming from Bangalore I was expecting a nice salubrious climate throughout the year. But no, Texas is characterized by extremely hot summers (100+) and bone chilling winters.

We moved to Texas during winter and were hoping that we would experience mild summer and wouldn't need air conditioning in the house. But we were grossly mistaken, it is impossible to survive a Texas summer without air conditioning. But what we did was to minimize the use of air conditioning so we could save some valuable $$$s. Something that everybody would love to do in this tough economic times.

Anyway as a first step effort we maintained the indoor temperature only slightly cooler than the external temperature. Say when it is 100 outside, the inside would be 80. Next step was to insulate the home by placing barriers to prevent heat from coming in. Yes we have double pane windows, but they are not much help during summer. First step, we installed wooden blinds and heavy curtains, always drawn during sunny days. The ceiling fans are always on to keep air circulation going on. The patio is west facing and the maximum heat comes from the afternoon sun into our living room. We tried to avoid sun coming in by installing bamboo shades and it worked pretty well.

With all these steps in place we were able to keep our electricity bills low even with the air conditioning system running. Because we cooled the house we didn't have to keep the temperature too low and stress out the air conditioning system.