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Yeah, exactly my feelings. I'm not sure I understand in 2020 the whole "turning on" the AC or "turning on" the furnace. These things are controlled by thermostats, and even dumb thermostats (which you SHOULD have a smart thermostat, they're not expensive anymore at all, Nest went on sale last Black Friday for $130!) have the ability to decide what needs to happen independent of any human interaction. My system does whatever it needs to do to be at the temperatures it needs to be at, all year around. I would venture to say in Las Vegas in a house that's this well insulated (R-18 with 6" thick walls) and with a good deal of electronics that produce heat and two people usually home, if I checked my Nest stats later this spring, I doubt it would use any heat after March. It tends to warm up here by April and then be warm enough during the days that the house will heat up, and at night we have the thermostat down to 66-69 range so it can be colder and not need to kick on the heat.
Ironically it's the heat that I can't wait to stop using because my main complaint about the way they built this house is the Builder's Special cheapo garbage AC and furnace. In 2020 in a luxury home they shouldn't be installing either, it should be an HVAC unit like maybe two Trane XVi 20s that I had at the last house, where the energy efficiency rating is off the charts. Instead, this city is obsessed with natural gas, which is beyond baffling as electricity is much cheaper than natural gas. There's abundant solar energy, which we have robust solar panels, so even with AC running full blast during the summer, the solar system produces so much energy it hardly matters at all, but I don't have a natural gas mine under the house so that ain't free, which means winter bills are worse than summer bills, exactly the opposite of what you'd expect in Vegas.
Well, not everyone has thermostats, believe it or not, lol. Not our homes in SoCal, Montana, Utah, Ecuador or here in Portugal. There are only electric space heaters and no a/c. In Ecuador, only split unit a/c and no heat. All year around.
We are expecting weather to be in the 80s today. We took the cover off the a/c unit yesterday. But it's due to be cloudy all day so I'm not expecting to turn the a/c on today. I have fans in the house if anything
April was below average in temperature, and May has been much below average so far. I wonder not whether I will need a coat to mow tomorrow, but rather, how heavy of coat I will need. The heat has run all day today; it never got warm enough for it to pause in the afternoon.
I have 2 wall furnaces, one heats the kitchen and spare bedroom, the other heats my living room and master bedroom. I've read that each pilot light will burn about 3 or 4 bucks worth of natural gas each month, so I shut off the kitchen/spare bedroom furnace in mid April, as it will not get chilly enough to bother me in those rooms which I spend little time in. Some heat from the warmer side of the house will bleed thru the curtain doorway (for kitty) to the cool side, helping to keep it warm enough. The living room furnace does not get shut off until about the third week of May, I check the long range forecast at that time and if any nights are forecast to be below 50, I might hang in there until the first week of June before shutting it down.
The window AC unit gets installed a few days before they forecast 80 degree weather, I clean it first, not just the front filter, but I take the cover off it, and blow out the back evaporator coil where the fan blows on it, as there is always a layer of cottonwood and dandy lion fibers plugging it up from previous season, it's nice to have an air compressor for that, but I don't have one, so I take a trash bag and wrap it tight on the fan shaft where it comes out of the motor in back, to protect the fan motor from getting wet, and use a garden hose to spray from the back thru the fins, to get the crap out of it. Sometimes I use an old toothbrush to help in that process, before hosing it. Gotta be careful not to bend the fins, air must pass freely thru the coil to obtain maximum efficiency.
My window AC unit is only 5000 BTU and draws maybe 450 watts on high speed, our summers can get hot so I want that extra 10 % cooling power it gives me from being clean. The other side of the house gets hot in the late afternoon, sometimes 85 or 90 degrees, but over here on the cool side, it will not climb above the low 80's even if we get a 100 degree day, I have a box fan to help cool me on those really hot days, which we rarely get more than a dozen of those per summer. Otherwise, it cools down to the temp I set it on without any problem. On really hot days, the AC runs all day and compressor will not shut off until about 3AM in the morning, when it finally catches up, lol. Then when I get up in the morning and notice the kitchen is still hot as hell, I open up the curtain and let the cool air flood into the other side of the house, and work that AC all morning getting the whole house cooled back down, and sometime around mid to late afternoon, I close the curtain so it keeps it cool over on this side where it matters.
I don't remove the window AC until the end of October, sometimes we get some freakish hot days in Oct, but that is rare, don't usually need it after the end of September. The living room furnace gets sparked up around late September or early October, never later than mid October, when morning lows go down into the 40's. The kitchen furnace gets fired up in mid November, when lows go down into the low 20's or teens at night.
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