When you’re looking for a way to improve the energy efficiency in your home, you probably think of using electrical appliances less, not more. But, we want you to consider how much you use your ceiling fans. Or if you do not have ceiling fans installed, how much they can benefit you.
Before we go any further, we do want to mention how important it is to have your ceiling fans installed by a professional Franklin, TN electrician. Trying to do it on your own can end with property damage, injury, and potentially even a fire hazard.
Understandably though, you’re probably wondering just how beneficial ceiling fans can actually be.
Ceiling Fans Are Just for Cooling, Right?
Well, no. In fact, ceiling fans won’t cool your home down at all if you use them by themselves. We do understand how you’d come to this conclusion. There is a fan in your home’s AC system after all—isn’t this what keeps you cool? In an air conditioner though, there’s a number of components in addition to that fan working to cool down your home, such as:
- Refrigerant to transfer heat from one area to another—from inside your home to the outdoors.
- A coil indoors to help absorb heat and cool it down.
- A compressor that adds pressure to the refrigerant.
Without each of these components, and more, all the fan part would do is recycle the warm, stale air already in your home. A fan simply moves air around—but this is a good thing! Because when combined with your air conditioner, it can help lower your cooling bills.
Ceiling Fans as a Supplement
A fan alone cannot cool your home—we covered that above. But, it can help you save money on your AC bills by doing a better job of evenly distributing the air that your cooling system produces. A stagnant vent on the wall can’t move air through the home as effectively as you’d like sometimes, especially in larger homes. Therefore, a ceiling fan can be pretty useful!
Multi-level homes can be particularly hard to keep cool since heat naturally rises. Ceiling fans help push the cool air back down, thus cooling the rooms faster and allowing your AC to shut off sooner, reducing your monthly bills.
So, no, a ceiling fan does not have any cooling power on its own. But it helps us feel cooler.
This is because fans help sweat to evaporate from our bodies with ease, and that’s how our bodies naturally cool off. This is why you feel cooler standing in front of a fan, not because it’s actually cooling the air. If you use a ceiling fan on a day with moderate temperatures, it might reduce your dependence on air conditioning, enabling you to shut it off for awhile, effectively saving you energy and money.
Let’s Talk about Heating Efficiency
We spent a lot of time talking about your cooling efforts, which may seem odd given the time of year it is. But there is one very cool thing many people don’t realize about ceiling fans—the direction of the fan blades can be reversed with a simple flick of a switch located right near the blades on the center of the fan.
This matters because when the blades go in the opposite direction, they pull hot air down instead of pushing cool air down. That means that on a cold day when you’re using your heater, you can turn on your ceiling fans to supplement. This allows your heater to shut off sooner and also allows you to set the temperature a bit lower.
Overall, the hidden power of ceiling fans is that no matter the time of year, they help improve efficiency and save you money!
At Covenant Heating and Cooling, we are “Dedicated to the Promise of Serving You!” Contact us today for superior HVAC and electrical services.