Pioneering Strategies That Cut Summer Energy Bills

NEW CONCORD, Ohio – Many homes were built before the advent of air conditioning and some even before electricity.

Which begs the question, how did people live before those modern conveniences and would adopting those methods cut the costs of 21st-century energy bills? 

“Well, first of all, I’m guessing they were a lot tougher than us,” Guernsey Muskingum Electric Cooperative Energy Advisor Ray Crock said. “But a large part of what they did was trying to keep the heat out of the house. A lot of your old homes had a summer kitchen or the kitchen was offset from the house, so that they could cook and that heat and humidity wasn’t in their house to start with. That can carry over to today when we go outside and barbecue.”

Many of the drafty, older homes were built to naturally ventilate themselves and used heavy drapery around the windows to prevent direct sunlight from radiating inside. However, many newer homes are not built to self-ventilate, even though they have hot water tanks, ovens and dryers.

“I’ll be talking to somebody that’s questioning me about solar panels and I’ll make a comment about, well why don’t you get a solar clothes dryer. And they get all excited, and you know, will they make those? And where do you get one? And I’m like, well at the hardware store I said, it’s a clothes line. And they act all disappointed because they wanted something mechanical and sexy that had a solar panel or something. They didn’t want to just hang out clothes.”

In addition to creating unwanted heat within a house, clothes dryers can use 5,000 watts, which creates huge spikes in your daily electrical usage. Spikes that the pioneers didn’t have to worry about.