Air conditioning

So I have a room in a guesthouse at the moment and currently I have a 100 kilowatt allowance each month. I'm worried about exceeding this limit. I am NOT a fan of the heat so I would be using it whenever I was in the room and at night when I sleep.

I've never been in a situation where I needed to use an A/C, seeing as I'm from Canada. So I would like to know some basic things about how people save energy costs with their A/C. Do I sleep with the air conditioning on? Do you turn it off when you leave your home? Should I buy a fan as well?

Are there such things as battery powered air conditioning units (portable)?

Thanks!

Soaringshrimp,

In an era when the earth is at its crisis, every summer the media shows us how we could save energy and this is what I keep hearing.

Do I sleep with the air conditioning on?

It's all up to how much you can tolerate the heat. But you can try taking a shower just before you go to bed so that you're not all sticky, and then you can wrap a towel around an Ice-non or something you can buy at convenience stores and put it under your head. Applying water or ice on your arm-pit, sides of neck and the top-front of your thighs also help cooling you down. Needless to say, you want to keep your windows open.

Do you turn it off when you leave your home?

Of course, unless you're staying at a nice hotel!

Should I buy a fan as well?

Yes, you should. It saves energy to run both an electric fan and the air-conditioner, rather than to just have the air-conditioner running. Place the fan so that the air-conditioner would be behind the fan. That way, the fan will circulate the cool air coming from the air-conditioner.

Are there such things as battery powered air conditioning units (portable)?

Sort of. But the shop told me that it's not worth it, especially in small rooms, since the unit itself will heat up.

Additional to all this, close your curtains in order to prevent hot sun light from coming in. For example, if you keep the curtains shut during the day, your room won't get as hot during the evening. However, in order to prevent mold, you also need to have enough sun to keep your room dry. So it would be ideal if you can close the curtains only when the sun is strongest.

Since you're in a guest house, that may be about all you could do, but if you're still living in Japan next May, try to plant some vines such as morning glory or cucumber so that it will make what we call a "green curtain."

Sprinkling water on the exterior after sunset helps reduce the heat as well.

Do your best on utilizing public transportation and libraries where you can keep yourself in air-conditioned rooms without having to pay much.

But you know what? I used to live in California where it's very dry and I couldn't tolerate the humidity in Tokyo until I saw a Suntory summer high-ball ad on TV. It was an ad where a couple of exotic women lay comfortablly in a tropical room. Think Gauguin.

Do I sleep with the air conditioning on?

We wouldn't feel comfortable keeping the windows open at night, so this is what we do: use the timer on the air conditioning unit so that it stays on for one hour or so after we go to bed (so that we can fall asleep comfortably), switches itself off then, then come on again about one hour before we get up.

But it is truly up to how much heat you can tolerate - we tend to find it too cool if we left the air conditioner on all night long - once a British friend of ours stayed over in our place, and he blasted the air conditioner throughout the night, at a very low temperature, so that when next morning we walked into the room he stayed in I felt like I was in a big fridge! lol

Of course you turn off the A/C when you go out- leaving an A/C running all day while you are out at work at school would be a huge waste of money and resources.

It doesn't take long for the A/C to cool the room it's in if you turn it on when you get home, or if you really can't stand coming home to a hot house (some places heat up more than others), you can set the timer to turn it on half an hour before you get home.

The other posters reminded me of a couple of other things.

You can save energy by turning off the air-conditioner a few minutes before you leave the room. The room will still be air-conditioned.

In summer, you are encouraged to set the air-conditioner to 28 degrees C in order to save energy.