I used to wonder why my parents would freak out all the time whenever we would have the door open for too long in the summer season.
I often would have friends come over to ask me to come out to play basketball or football or something.
Of course, I would sit there with the door open while talking to them and then I would be yelled at. My father would usually threaten to ground me and a few times I was grounded for real. Back then, I didn’t understand the expense of having to provide cooling to the household, I just thought it was something that was totally inexpensive. I couldn’t have been more wrong about that though. I didn’t start to understand until I moved out on my own for the first time. I had a crappy apartment but I purchased a window AC unit. I thought I could just crank the AC unit all the time and I did for the first couple of months. When I saw how costly my energy bills were, I totally freaked out. I thought there was no way my window AC unit could be using that much energy, but it was… I suddenly quit using my window AC unit and started using a stationary fan instead. It was quite miserable to be honest going without air conditioning, but that’s when my energy bills were actually affordable. I came to find that if I used the AC system on a higher temperature control setting, I could get a fair amount of cooling in my place without having such costly bills. It helped using the AC unit and the fan at the same time too.