Are you looking for a way to make your home a lot more comfortable, without spending more money on air conditioning? Ceiling fans could be the way – they can make your home feel a lot cooler in the summer, and a lot warmer in the winter, and they’re far more sustainable than air conditioning.
Installing ceiling fans in your home can save you money on climate control, and keep you comfortable all year round. Ceiling fans can reduce your carbon footprint, and they don’t take up space on the floor. Plus, today’s ceiling fans come with all kinds of cool features, like smart connectivity, dimmable lighting, and more.
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1) Save Money on Heating and Cooling
If there’s only one reason to install ceiling fans in your home, it’s the money they can save you on heating and cooling. Ceiling fans cost just $0.003 cents an hour to run, so even if you run them 24 hours a day, you’re still only going to be spending a few dollars a month. Central air, on the other hand, costs about $0.49 cents an hour to run, and you do tend to run your air conditioning 24 hours a day, so it can easily add up to $100 or more over the course of a month.
Of course, just because you install ceiling fans doesn’t mean you’re going to stop using your air conditioner altogether. But it does mean you can turn your thermostat up. A ceiling fan can make it feel four degrees Fahrenheit cooler in a room just by the airflow it generates. The Department of Energy says that you can save up to 10 percent on your heating and cooling costs just by turning your thermostat up by seven to ten degrees Fahrenheit for eight hours a day. Even if you only turn your thermostat up by a few degrees, you could see noticeable savings on your power bill.
2) Feel More Comfortable Year-Round
It’s a common misconception that ceiling fans only keep you more comfortable in the summer. While it’s true that the majority of your energy savings is going to come in the summer months, ceiling fans can keep you nice and warm in the winter, too. Just flip the switch on the side of the motor housing to reverse the direction of the fan blades so they turn clockwise. Keep the fan on the lowest speed setting. Warm air from your heating registers rises to the top of the room, so running the ceiling fan in this manner will push it back down to the bottom of the room where it can keep you warm.
3) Reduce Your Carbon Footprint
Ceiling fans use about one percent of the power used by air conditioning, and they can cut your use of heating fuels in the winter to a lesser degree. So, if you’re looking for a way to make your lifestyle more sustainable, you should be looking at ceiling fans. You can cut your use of fossil fuels substantially simply by using your ceiling fans to their full potential year-round.
4) Free Up Floor Space
If you’re already relying on pedestal fans, box fans, tower fans, and table fans to generate cooling breezes in your home, then ceiling fans are the next logical home upgrade. Installing ceiling fans can free up the floor space in your home that would otherwise go to floor and pedestal fans. You can also get rid of any table fans that are cluttering up the place. You’ll enjoy the same cooling breezes, and ceiling fans are less likely to kick up dust and debris from the floor.
5) Enjoy Features like Lighting, Smart Connectivity and More
Ceiling fans today have so many features that can make them so much more user-friendly than the ceiling fans of the past, which offered a few speed settings, a pull chain control, a motor reversal switch, and usually nothing else. These days, you can buy programmable fans that can be set to run on a schedule, or fans with temperature sensors that will click on automatically when they sense that the room has gotten too hot. You can buy smart fans that connect to your smart home device, so you can control your fans with your voice, or your smartphone, so you can control your fans from anywhere. There are plenty of fan features to choose from.
If you don’t have ceiling fans in your home, it’s time to put some in. Ceiling fans are a sustainable choice for the eco-conscious homeowner, and they can make your home so much more comfortable, you’ll wonder what took you so long to get on the bandwagon.
