Summer Electric Bill Saver: Your Basement is an Air Conditioner!

HOTTER THAN BLAZES!!!

Last winter I moved into this beautiful 1920s-era house in a nice neighborhood. It has two floors and a big empty basement. All for 500 bananas a month! I was thrilled.

Nice house or not, summer came and the temps soared up over the 90's. The heat has gone right through the nice walls of this nice house. It's hot!

I was thinking about cranking up the air conditioning (AC). But before I did, I felt a pang of guilt... I know now where the power for my AC comes from: my local coal-fired power plant, which pollutes both the sky and the ground. I wrote about this serious pollution issue here. There was no way I wanted to contribute to this already out-of-control problem by turning on my AC.

So, how could I get "free" air conditioning, or at least some kind of AC that wouldn't gobble loads of power? Soon after asking this question, I noticed something that made me stop in my tracks: the basement was a cool customer. It was even actually livable!

While I was sweltering upstairs, whenever I'd go into the basement to do laundry or grab a tool out of storage, the air was placid and cool. This gave me an idea that has kept me cool enough up to now. Here's what I did...

BASEMENT AS AIR CONDITIONER

Now knowing I could use the basement somehow to help cool off my home, I thought about several ways to get that cool air upstairs, or at least on me and my sweaty skin.

I suggest you read through each of these to see what scenario applies to your home...

1. Move into the dungeon: My first thought was to move downstairs. Hmmm, doable in some homes, especially the newer ones. In my home, the basement has thick concrete walls (that's a good thing) that help conduct heat and shed off cool air. Since the basement has a couple "crawl-through" windows leading in from the outside at ground level, it also had the potential for good air circulation.

The only thing that has kept me from moving into the basement (at least for sleeping in) is that the ceiling loaded with a messy array of electrical conduits, and water and sewer pipes. Not a nice scene to relax with.