If you dread the arrival of summer due to a hot uncomfortable second or upper floor in your home, there are ways to help your air conditioner work more efficiently. Here are our 2-story house air conditioning tips to help you sleep better when the heat is at its worse.
Manage Your Upper Rooms
This is a cost-free tip that can make a world of difference to room temperature. You can improve efficiency by experimenting with how you manage the air in your rooms. You can first try leaving all your doors open upstairs to see if the floor feels generally cooler. This works best for smaller homes with a simple hall and stairs that aren’t too open or intricate. It might just be you need to get the cold air moving through the entire area.
If this doesn’t work, you can try the opposite which is closing all the doors. This works well in larger spaces with a more open stairwell as this can waste cold air and keep it floating down to the lower floor. With the doors closed, the cold air that makes it way up can stay contained inside each room.
Install a Programmable or Smart Thermostat
If you have an older thermostat, replacing it with a programmable or smart thermostat can help central air conditioning in a two-story house. It offers energy efficiency benefits for energy cost savings while allowing you to manage home temperatures throughout the day. However, an even better idea is to install a thermostat upstairs. The reason many second stories aren’t as comfortable is that the thermostat tends to be on the main floor.
Lower floors stay cooler, which means the AC will turn off once the ideal temperature is reached on the main floor. If you have a second thermostat upstairs, it will give the proper reading for that upper level, so the AC continues to operate until the second level is cooled. Many smart thermostats come with nodes or sensors that can also be placed in specific rooms or on the top floor to give your thermostat the best chance at understanding the temperature differences in your home.
How To Cool Upstairs of a 2-Story Home
One AC unit for a two-story home is often not enough if you have a larger home, or you just can’t seem to reach the comfort level you prefer upstairs. In this case, installing what is called a mini-split or ductless air conditioner can help. Adding air conditioning to the second floor with a mini-split, allows you to have a unit in each room and/or designated areas of the home. As a result, you can control the temperature upstairs separately.
For example, if you have front bedrooms facing the south that are way hotter than the back bedrooms, you can put handlers in those rooms to keep them cooler at bedtime. The unit can be installed on the floor, wall or ceiling, and is controlled by an individual controller. They are easy to install because the system is actually ductless. You can choose the rooms, so even if there is a front room that tends to heat up on the main floor you can add a unit there as well. Better yet, you also can use it for heating in the winter, making it ideal for rooms such as bedrooms above the garage that tend to be too cold. This is why these units are also known as heat pumps.
Best Way To Cool 2-Story House With Proper Settings
Sometimes changing the fan setting on your thermostat to “on” helps. Many people keep it on “auto” which means it turns on and off along with the cooling function. When it is set to on, the blower fan helps provide a more even mix of cool air throughout the whole house.
If you would like more information on updating your thermostat or the benefits of a ductless system for your home, speak to the experts at Cedarwood today.
