Over the weekend I did a thorough cleaning on Big A's room.  Wow, if these bursts of energy remain consistent I'll be convinced to do the GAPS diet for the rest of my life! After all, it's just eating good healthy, real, natural, traditional foods. And I'm not even doing organic foods!

Big A's room has been warmer than it should be, and Mr. A thought he might need to move the air conditioning vent to a different position in the room, or perhaps install a second vent. When Mr. A replaced our air conditioner last year, he bought a different style unit (previously we had a split system which had parts in the house and outside – the new one should be more efficient and all of it sits outdoors) and he changed the location where the unit would sit outside.  This caused a bit of problem inside the house with the efficiency of air circulation since the air was being pushed from a different direction.  Mr. A had to reinstall venting underneath the house and it seemed to work fine last year.

Big A's bed was halfway over the vent, so Mr. A thought that also might be inhibiting the air from circulating throughout the room.  I told Mr. A that I had been planning to do a spring cleaning on Big A's room, and that could easily include moving his bed away from the vent, and placing his floor fan in such a position that it would circulate the air into the room better.  So he said to go ahead and do that and we'd evaluate the air temperature and see if that helped.

I also decided to lug in the carpet cleaner and go over Big A's carpet. It wasn't too bad but it hasn't been cleaned in a couple of years and with the dust out here I was sure it could use the attention.

While I'm working in his room, I happened to notice that his window was open by 1/2 an inch!!   I called to Mr. A and asked him to come look at something.  When he got into the room I pointed to the window and asked him if he noticed anything out of the ordinary. Of course he noticed right away it was cracked open!

Good grief!! Having that window cracked was akin to having a grapefruit sized hole open, which was allowing hot air to freely flow into Big A's room.  No wonder his room was warmer than usual!!

It turns out the window had misaligned on the track and that was causing it to not seat properly.  I guess the last time I had that window open was when it was cool outside, so doggone it, we've been throwing money right out the window, so to speak.

Mr. A had already done an energy audit trying to find where warm air might be coming in, and earlier in the month bought weatherstripping* for the front and back door as the previous material had worn down.

We're also planning to coat our roof with that Elastomeric Roof Coating*. We talked about it earlier in the season but Mr. A got swamped with work and hasn't had a chance to get to that. We are pretty sure the insulation in our home is very good since we have never had to turn on the heater since we've lived here (8 years).   We don't seem to have any attic space to speak of so I think that heat just penetrates through the roof into the house.

It's really important to make sure everything is sealed tightly when you run an air conditioning system.

Have you checked for energy leaks lately?

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