If you want to save some money on heating and cooling bills, consider installing a ceiling fan and using it to circulate air rather than turning on the air conditioner or heater. The typical AC unit will use thousands of watts of electricity and the typical ceiling fan will use less than a hundred, over the course of a season that can result in significant power savings.

Summer Settings

In the summer, you want the fan to be blowing down and spinning fast. Your ceiling fan will have a switch somewhere that changes it from spinning clockwise to counterclockwise (and vice versa). In the summer, you want it to be blowing very quickly and blowing downward. The wind will blow the heat away from your body and thus make you feel cooler.

Winter Settings

Since heat rises, all the heat in a room will be near the ceiling. In the winter, you’ll want the fan to be blowing towards the ceiling (so flip that switch) and spinning slowly so that it circulates the hot air down to the rest of the room. If you turn it too fast, you get more circulation than you need; you want to gently urge the hot air down into the rest of the room.

Did you know that many devices these days can draw power even when they are turned off? Nearly any electronic device with a soft switch will continue to draw electricity, a small amount, when turned off because of that “instant on” feature. These electrical drains, called phantom electricity drains, have the potential to cost you hundreds of dollars a year in power without having any benefit to you. Why not unplug them?

How can you identify whether or not a device is drawing power? Easy, look for a hard switch. Buttons are a tell-tale sign that the device isn’t off. If there’s a little red light (or any light), that’s another sign that electricity is being drawn. It’s only when you have a hard switch, like a light switch, is the physical connection broken. If you don’t break that connection, the circuits and switches in the device will provide resistance and draw power from the grid.

So, how do you use less power? The easiest way is to plug everything into a power strip and then pull out the strip when you don’t use it. Otherwise, unplug things you know you won’t use for a while. No sense paying for something you don’t need right? The power companies don’t need the money as much as you do!