How to Use Your Smart Thermostat to Stay Cool This Summer

If you’re one of the growing numbers of families that has installed a smart thermostat, your household is probably overjoyed that you made the investment when this hot and sticky time of year rolls around.

With temperature controls at your fingertips or even through voice control, you can adjust the ambiance of your home from afar, thus always keeping it cool when you need it!

Smart thermostats are smart on their own, but with a little ingenuity, you can harness their power to get even more out of them in terms of comfort and savings. Revience, your Eden Prairie provider of advanced home automation solutions, has a few tips below.

Recommended Temperature Settings

Cooling your home is all about balancing your comfort level with the energy cost. The colder you want it, the more expensive it gets. But experts have weighed in with what they think is the sweet spot for well-balanced summer temperature control.

The consensus is to set your thermostat to 78°F while you’re home and bump it up to 85 - 88°F when you leave your house for at least a few hours. Just doing this alone can save you up to 10% on cooling costs while still maintaining a comfortable temperature in your home all summer.

Benefits of a Smart Thermostat

With a smart thermostat, keeping your cool while saving money has never been easier. Trying to keep track of when to adjust your thermostat to save the most money or remembering to change the setting whenever you leave or return gets complicated. So, choose the simpler option: program your thermostat for each season and let it control the savings for you.

Preset Temperatures

Preset your thermostat to automatically adjust the temperature when you leave your house for work each day and cool down again when you come home. You can even set it to prepare for your arrival by scheduling it to start cooling your home a few minutes before you arrive so your space is at the perfect temperature as soon as you walk through the door.

App Controls

When your schedule changes, use the smart controls on your phone or tablet to control your thermostat from anywhere. Before you head home, tap a button to start up your AC and enter a cool, comfy home.

Smart Home Sensors

If pushing buttons is still more than you want to hassle with, you can program some smart home systems to observe when you’re home or not, and they will control the indoor temperature for you based on your location.

Essentially, your smart home can save you money on energy by only using power when you’re around and need it.

Additional Measures to Maximize Your Cool

If 78°F still seems a little warm to you, experiment with your family on what temperatures work best, considering how this may change the cost of your energy bills. Or, try some of these other measures in tandem with your smart thermostat to stay cool.

Incorporate Fans

Your HVAC system may be pumping a lot of cold air that you’re not feeling, depending on where the vents in your home are located. Instead of cranking the A/C, add ceiling fans or plug-in fans that can circulate the cool air better. Sometimes simply having a breeze makes all the difference.

Watch Sunrise & Sunset

During the summer, days get gradually longer until they reach the solstice, at which point they begin to shorten once more. The sun rises earlier and sets later each day. Given that solar energy is a big part of what warms your home up in the summer, you should adjust your smart thermostat to meet it.

To maintain the ultimate comfort in your home, we recommend taking a few moments every week to adjust your home automation settings to reflect the sun’s routine. It’s key to living in harmony with the summer heat.

You may also save money with your smart thermostat settings along the way, as you can ease up on the AC during cooler nights.

Consider Automated Blinds

Curtains aren’t something we think about on a day-to-day basis, especially with the hectic pace of modern life. But that’s why it’s all too easy to forget to close them and let the sun in!

Sun isn’t bad at all, of course, but when it’s unexpected, it can mean that you aren’t taking full advantage of the comfort-boosting prowess of your smart thermostat. Sure, home automation gives you flexibility in what temperature you set your home to. Still, if you need to constantly adjust it to your comfort levels thanks to warming temperatures or weather that flip-flops between sunny and cloudy, that’s not flexibility—that’s just a pain.

Automated blinds are a seamless solution. Maintain consistency in your home by drawing the blinds with the touch of a button when you leave for work in the morning. This helps prevent warm spots and reduces the chances you’ll need to fiddle with your smart thermostat while away to combat summer’s unpredictable weather changes.

Check for Drafty Areas

Your smart thermostat is intelligent, in the mechanical sense of the word, but not even it can detect punctures in your home’s envelope. That’s up to you as a homeowner.

When windows have broken seals or doors lack weatherstripping, your smart thermostat might seem like it’s malfunctioning—like it can’t get your home to the temperature you desire as quickly as you’d like. In reality, you’re just paying to cool the outdoors!

Help your smart thermostat function at its best by giving it an airtight home in which to work. Many drafty areas can be easily located if you just take the time to examine your home visually.

After all, a crack in your caulk is plain as day. If you happen to have any dilapidated doors, those are common culprits, too. Condensation on the inside window pane, while a potential leak indicator in the winter, isn’t as reliable in the summer; usually, it denotes humidity issues.

How to Find Invisible Leaks

Unfortunately, not all air leaks are obvious, and whether a window or door leak is visible or not makes no difference to your smart thermostat. They can mess with your smart thermostat all the same. But the good news is that the go-to way to check for invisible issues is easy. To check for air leaks, you should:

1. Make sure all appliances that rely on combustion are safely turned off.

2. Close every potential opening your home has to the outside.

3. Turn on any fan that blows air outside, like attic or exhaust fans.

4. Hold lighted incense near areas where you suspect air leaks. If the smoke changes direction, you’ve got a problem. For a smoke-free solution, dip your hands in water to feel air leaks on your hand.

Keeping leaks down not only lowers your energy bill—which is probably part of why you hired a home automation installer in the first place—but it also ensures that you have ready access to the comfort you deserve, thanks to a handy and efficient smart thermostat.

Revience: Your One-Stop Home Comfort Shop

Looking to own a home that’s the ultimate in comfort? With our state-of-the-art home automation technology, our team can help. Find solutions to your temperature or energy usage problems, enhance your enjoyment of your home, and even create your own home power grid with the help of Revience! Give us a call today at 952-941-5289.