Something i do during the day while I’m home alone @Grandpa2390 is have the AC set a little higher (75), but I turn the fan from “auto” to “on”. I find this keeps the whole house feeling a bit cooler and helps with where I have a couple rooms that aren’t quite the same as the rest of the house. It evens things out. I pinch pennies when it’s just me.
haha. well the other thing about desert heat is that it is dry. so it is supposed to be more tolerable than the heat you and I are accustomed to.
here’s a perfect demonstration of how I get used to it. I usually turn the AC down to 82 when I get home from work. and sometimes I’ll turn it down to 78 before I go to bed just because I read that you get better sleep if it is cooler (but I don’t want to run it down to 72 or whatever is recommended, so I go halfway). but it gets turned back up to 82 at 10:30 automatically and then I coast through the night. (another money saving tip, run the AC hard at night in the beginning when prices are cheaper, and then coast).
and so you can see the result:
whereas if I keep it on 82 it will run here and there throughout the night.
(btw, it doesn’t always go that perfectly, sometimes it still runs once or twice in the middle of the night and before 12 pm the next day, but still…)
anyways, Thursday night, I didn’t put it down to 78, and yesterday I discovered in Sense that my AC randomly ran for an entire hour between 1:30 - 2:30 and I was like what the heck??? I didn’t turn it down to 78 and even if I had, it would have been done at around 9 PM, not 1:30 AM.
I finally get ahold of my AC history from the Nest App, and it turns out I had got home and completely forgot to turn the AC down to 82. I was home all that time and went to bed without even realizing I hadn’t turned my AC back on. at 1:30 in the morning, when I was half asleep, I guess, I turned it down to 82. lol.
Yeah that’s the Blower Motor. That’s what I was talking about when I said I would run the blower motor (whole house fan) but I don’t need to circulate air through the entire house when it is just me. my blower motor uses like 447 watts. much more than a ceiling fan or box fan in my room that blows right on me.
but definitely, oftentimes for me, being cool is less about temperature and more about the air just not being stagnant.
Now I had a girlfriend who kept her AC on like 65 or something like that. maybe 68… tops. Her house was freezing.
Humidity is definitely a major factor. I like to keep our house between 40% and 50%. We have wood floors so it’s important for it to stay pretty steady.
This new heat pump I had installed about a year ago does a really good job keeping the humidity just right without us having to do anything else.
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I have wood floors as well.
this is what freaked me out yesterday.
I was like what the heck is my AC running like that for while I’m asleep? Turns out I rolled over and adjusted the thermostat while sleeping or I briefly woke up long enough and forgot I had adjusted it in the middle of the night.
That looks a lot more active than your previous screenshots of the A/C.
Now the hard part. Did you wake up or was it an accident?
Either way, it appears that you sleep pretty well in the cooler environment. That’s exactly how I like it. I like to breath cold air but I sleep with a thick comforter/ duvet combo year round.
You mentioned using a dehumidifier, does your A/C not pull the moisture out well enough on its own?
Removing moisture makes the A/C not have to work as hard but too dry is not good for wood.
I reset six days ago and so far have nine detected.
The most recent was this morning but something isn’t right.
Sense names it “stove”. There is almost zero history for it and the stats say it’s 192 watts.
it’s more active because it was set from 85 to 82. I don’t remember how I changed it .
How do you figure that I slept better in the cooler environment?
as for the dehumidifier, I don’t run the A/C long enough to pull the humidity out of the air. if I ran it at 75 degrees like you guys, it would run 10 times as long and pull out the moisture. but I run it at 85 degrees. and
as you can see it is not running long enough to do anything to the humidity. at 85 degrees, the humidity in my house will keep at about 70%.
My AC is a bit oversized. So I would have to run it at 75 degrees or so, even when I’m not home, to keep the humidity down. the dehumidifier doesn’t just allow me to keep my house comfortable in the 80s, it also allows me to safely raise the temp in my house to 85 when I’m not home.
The air is not being kept too dry. As I said, I run the dehumidifier and keep the humidity at 40-45% those little spikes are the dehumidifier.
it might be interesting to see how much my AC would run if I unplugged the dehumidifier and set it to 75. I would have to give it a day to catch up. It wouldn’t be fair to set it to 75 and let the 4 hours it takes to cool my house down 10 degrees make it look like it’s costing me more.
But I think my dehumidifier is saving me money.
I figured maybe you slept better because if it was a change done on purpose, you slept right through changing it back.
Here is the difference in running ours 73 vs yours at 82-85.
This is the weekend so our stays 73 day and night while everyone is home.
Last 24 hours
What do you mean I slept right through changing it back?
edit: post a 24 hour period.
That was 24 hours but the app is cropping it.
Try another
Apparently Sense is missing some be because it shows it has t been running the last few hours an it has run almost constantly
That is just the heat pump device. The while power meter would give you a heart a ttack
k because in my experience, the device meters aren’t accurate. your pump could be running more often than that. Right now I have like 4 devices for my AC. AC1, 2, 3, 4 and none of them accurately capture my AC.
The next step for me, is to get something like a portable air conditioner, and put it in my room so I can keep the big AC on 85, and cool just my bedroom down at night 
I’m looking into that now. How much they go for, how long they take to cool down a space, etc. I don’t know though. Consumer Reports says that they don’t cool that well. I hate the look and permanence of a window unit though.
I’ve been thinking of the same for my garage, where I spend a lot of time.
What I’m leaning toward is on Amazon.
They have a delonghi Brand On Amazon with prices as low as $220 for 480 square foot.
I noticed you were replying after I edited my post. did you see the article by consumer reports?
I would just do a window unit on the back of my house (so that it doesn’t make my house look unsightly) but I’m nervous about it creating a vulnerable point of entry. I really don’t want to screw it in and make it permanent.
Of course, the rational side of me wonders if a burglar who is willing to break an AC out of the window to get in, wouldn’t have just broken the window.
We used small window units in bedrooms for years, before putting central geothermal HVAC. We never had trouble with them and even the relatively in-expensive units did a nice job for our 120 and 180 sq foot bedrooms. They did cool the bedroom down over a period of hours, because we didn’t run them all day, just evening and some of the night. As I recall, they ranged from about 5,000 btu ($150 or so) to 8,000 btu, and I don’t remember the costs.
While window units can be a pain, there are now units that sit inside and use hoses to a flat panel in the window. These can even be run without removing screens and look far better from the outside. They do cost somewhat more, though.
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