Cooling Efficiency Tips: Using Ceiling Fans

Air movement throughout your home has a huge impact on your home comfort. But while natural ventilation (such as opening windows or doors) and forced air (airflow pushed through your ductwork by your air conditioner or furnace) may be the most visible and obvious sources of airflow in your home, you shouldn’t underestimate one addition source of breezes and currents: your ceiling fan.

Ceiling fans are a low-cost way to cool down in the summer – and, surprisingly, to warm up in the winter. Their cooling effect comes from two different sources:

1. Air moving across your skin cools your body, and also washes away the air right next to your skin that has become warmed by your body heat. This is the principle behind the wind chill that’s reported on winter weather reports, and is also why a breeze feels cool on a hot day.
2. Mixing cool air with warmer air. Because cool air sinks to the ground, its cooling effects are frequently concentrated around your feet – which may or may not be useful to you. The gentle downward pressure of a ceiling fan displaces the cooler air near the ground, bringing it up to mingle with the air around your whole body.

It’s worth noting that both of these effects work to increase the comfort of people in the rooms – they don’t cause the rooms themselves to be cooler. Leaving your fan running while a room is empty doesn’t deliver any benefits.

Ceiling fans have two directions: counterclockwise and clockwise. One of these is the summer direction, and the other is the winter direction. Just as a gentle downward pressure from your fan can mix cool air with the warmer air around your body, a gentle upward pressure from the fan’s winter direction will displace the warm air near the ceiling, and send it downward toward you.

If you want to learn more about your ceiling fan, or other low-cost ways to improve your cooling and heating efficiency, call us at Energy 1 Heating & Air Conditioning! We’re proud to support our Lorain-area neighbors.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in Lorain, Ohio about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about using ceiling fans and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Guide or call us at 440-201-2959.

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