I live by myself in a 1600 sq ft or so single level rancher type residence built circa 1952. There is some some fiberglass batting in the attic but otherwise house is not particularly well insulated.
I typically resist using the AC until it’s unbearably hot. For cooling I use two big Patton floor fans facing where I sit. They are noisy but it’s just me in the house so no one cares.
I have while house AC and a relatively new heat pump that’s 4 years old. It cools the house nicely but jumps up my electric bills an additional $100. - $150. + a month if I use it regularly.
Sleeping is the worst scenario if the weather is hot and sticky and have a fan blowing on you all night can sometime get irritating.
I’m wondering if buying a small window AC for my approx 300 sq ft bedroom and using it just for sleeping makes sense vs the whole house AC.
From a purely economic point of view, using the window unit would certainly be less expensive, especially if you only use it at night to sleep. You’ll probably recoup the cost of the window unit in the first year of use.
Yes, absolutely worth it. Your standard window AC unit is $100 at Home Depot/Sears/Target. They come with different brand-names but they all look suspiciously alike and are probably all made in the same factory in China.
I have three going and my electric bill is a bit uncomfortable, but not outrageous.
A single bedroom AC was all my relatives had when I was a kid. It was only turned on in the evening about an hour and half before bedtime. Slept cool & comfortable. it was turned off the next morning before going to work. Later they added a window AC for the den that was only turned on when they were watching tv.
Central Air is a modern luxury. It’s nice. But, really unnecessary unless you have a big family thats sleeping in multiple rooms. If you need more than three window AC’s running, then central AC probably is just as cheap. Trying to cool a whole house with window units would certainly cost more than central AC.
If you choose this route, I recommend you buy and place a couple, 2-3 humidity and temperature monitors around the house (I think you can get 3 for $30 at Radio Shack) to make sure you don’t end up with an unhealthy level of humidity in the rest of the house, one which will encourage mould growth or damage/warp wood, artworks, etc.
We’re both small people (here comes the snark…) and we would happily set our whole-house AC to only run at 84-85F, except the humidity gets really oppressive at that level (we have monitors all around the house) and we have a lot of art. So we have to compromise at 78-80F.
We’ve got what I think of as a rather large two-story house (2100 sq. ft.) with one medium-size evaporative cooler that vents into the upstairs hall. It works okay for most of the house most of the time, but our master bedroom, which is about the same size as yours, is on the south side of the house upstairs and the cooler is just incapable of cooling it unless we direct all the air into the bedroom. We put up with that for about two years, and then we got a refrigerated air conditioner unit as a supplement. It works like a charm, and it’s been working for eight years now.
We didn’t want to dedicate the bedroom window to an air conditioner year-round, though. Because our window has a sash that slides up and it faces out onto a balcony, we strapped the air conditioner to a heavy coated metal shelving unit that we put up outside of the window. In the summer, we move it so that the A/C unit sticks into the window, and in the fall we cover the unit and move it to one side. This leaves us with a functional window from September through April and an air conditioner from May through August.
Where we are, we don’t have any humidity issues. If you do, is it possible to use a dehumidifier or is that impractical for some reason? (I didn’t even know that such a thing existed until I was well into my twenties and I’m still kind of befuddled by the idea.) At any rate, I’m an enthusiastic proponent of the window unit idea.
We had a condo in Chicago that had 3 wall AC units. One in each bedroom and one in the living room. Most of the time, we used open windows and fans, and then cooled down our bedroom. We did find that if we shut off the AC during the day, the humidity and temp increase would make the wall AC work really hard and sometimes ice up. We started leaving the bedroom AC on, but turned up towards 80° during the day, and lowered it before going to bed. That kept the humidity level down in that room.
I just suggested as much - one unit in his bedroom window for the price Erdosain quoted - to a FB friend/formed co-worker who keeps whining about the heat.
I second this advice.
Keep your central AC running, but at a higher temp, so it only comes on occasionally. That & fans can keep you comfortable in the house, and the window AC will have less work to do to keep the bedroom cooled overnight.
Window AC’s are generally less efficient than a central AC, but this is offset by only cooling the room you are using at nighttime.
FYI…a high temp and high temp would indeed make your system work harder, but it would not make your system ice up. Quite the contrary; high temp and high humidity would have the opposite effect.
There was something else going on causing the icing.