Califonia King Bedding

Keep your cool, efficiently and cheaply, with fans

Somewhere in modern America, there are people who do not like air conditioning. But they are awfully hard to find. After studying home energy use for decades, scientist Danny Parker puts the number of air-conditioning heretics at "1 to 2 percent of the population."

Some of these people prefer fresh air, Parker said, and he's one of them.

Sweltering in misery is not necessary. Get enough air moving over your skin, said Edward Arens, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and "you can be comfortable up to 86 degrees. We often see this in our own lab."

The air conditioner is a glutton, said Parker, principal research scientist at the Florida Solar Energy Center. It gobbles up 25 percent of all electricity used in a typical U.S. home, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, part of the Department of Energy. And almost two-thirds of all homes (and nearly 90 percent of new housing units) have central air.

The Energy Information Administration also has found that less than 4 percent of households with central air turn it off during the workday when no one is home.

There is a case to be made that people have become "addicted to air conditioning," Arens said. "They have it in their car, they have it in their workplace and in every store they go into, and in their house.

"You can't just cool all this stuff off without using a lot of electricity and dumping the heat and CO2 in the atmosphere. It's increasing all over the world. When the Chinese start using it the way we do, we're going to melt the ice sheets."

This is where fans could cut in. A good window air-conditioning unit, Parker said, will cost 14 cents an hour to run, at average utility rates. A three-ton central-air unit, a common cooling system, will costs 36 cents an hour.

By comparison, a typical ceiling fan, set at medium speed, can spin for three hours before the utility bill adds up to a penny.

So I bought three fans online. One was a super-high-efficiency ceiling fan, with blades inspired by the slower-turning propellers on human-powered aircraft. This fan would replace the overhead light in the bedroom and run during the stifling hours of the night.

The second was a 20-inch window unit with metal paddles and panels on the sides, which would double as an exhaust fan in the kitchen.

The last was a 36-inch industrial-grade drum fan with a one-third horsepower belt-driven motor.

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