Avoid the Sun Beatdown

When we moved into our house, I noticed that in the late afternoon, it would get too cold in the summer and really chilly in the winter.  It was as if the AC was on overdrive in the first case, and the heater was failing in the second case.

I realized that the thermostat to our central cooling and heating was on a wall in the dining room.  It faced the windows, which had a northwesterly exposure.  As the sun arced across the sky, the thermostat faced more sunshine, and with the shades fully up on those windows, the sun beat on it directly.

Our cooling and heating system is 18 years old, as that was when we moved in.  It's not exactly a smart system, but it's been something like a dutiful servant for us and kept us comfortable in our house.  So with that thermostat being the only sensor for temperature in the house, I had to find a solution.

Our end in mind was to solve the problem I mentioned at the outset.  The Core Algorithm posits that to solve any problem in the best, most optimal way, we need to have sufficient enough grasp of that problem.  That meant looking into it, recognizing what we had, and knowing how the system worked.

The afternoon sun is shining very brightly, but my Samsung Galaxy Note adjusted the exposure

I found a simple enough solution, that is, by walking backward to map the pathway: I had to prevent the sun from beating directly on the thermostat in the afternoon, and to do so it was enough to close the shades halfway down on those northwestern windows. In fact, these days we all live busy lives, so it made better sense to us just to keep the shades closed altogether, especially during the workweek.

We have a programmer on our thermostat, so it adjusts the setting to maintain our comfort and also to conserve energy, depending on time of day. For example, we can it keep fairly cool at night during the winter, as we're all in bed.

For a while, I tweaked the program, so that it would account for that northwesterly exposure. Specifically at 3 PM in the summer, I'd shift the setting from 74° to 76°. On hot summer days, our dining room gets hot, even with the shades fully closed.  By shifting it up, I made sure the AC didn't kick on needlessly, and chill the rest of the house too much.  Conversely, in the winter, the normal setting is 68°, and I'd raise the thermostat to 70°, so the heater would switch on and keep the temperature up where it needs to be in the rest of the house.

In time, though, I realized I didn't need to tweak the program that specifically. As long as the shades were at least halfway down in the afternoon, our system work perfectly fine and we kept our comfort while conserving energy.