Use fans to cut your heating and cooling bills

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Back to Step 9: Lower your heating, ventilation and air-conditioning costs

Use fans to cut your heating and cooling bills

Fans only cost about two cents per hour to run[1] and they can use up to 50 times less energy than air-conditioning units.[2]

They’re also very versatile – you can mount them on your ceiling, on your walls or move them from room to room. Regardless of what type of fan you use, they’re an extremely cheap way to reduce your HVAC bills.

Using fans in summer

Step 9 - Guard FanYou can use ceiling, wall, or free-standing fans to increase the cooling efficiency of your central air-conditioning.

The evaporative, or ‘wind-chill’ effect of air movement from fans means that people can feel just as cool with the thermostat set a number of degrees higher than normal.

 

Using fans in winter

Because hot air rises, in winter you should set your ceiling fan on a low speed in a ‘clockwise’ direction. This sends warm air near the ceiling back down to where you and your staff are. It’s a very cheap way to redistribute heat and can potentially reduce your heating costs by up to 10%.[3]

Step 9 - Ceiling Fan

Encourage temperature-appropriate clothing

In winter, it’s also appropriate to expect your staff to wear winter clothes. If someone is wearing a T-shirt and complains that it’s too cold, why not send an email reminder to all staff to wear winter-appropriate clothing to work?

 

Fans on high ceilingsStep 9 - Large Blower Fan

If you have very high ceilings in your premises, for example in a warehouse, you may want to invest in thermal destratification fans.[4] These can blow warm air back down to where people are sitting or walking around. It’s estimated that these can reduce heating energy use by up to 20%.[5]

If your ceiling is excessively high, you may also want to install a hanging ceiling.

 

When you leave a room, you should always turn off the lights. Make sure you do the same with your ceiling fans!

 

Greener Cleaner, NSW

Greener Cleaner saves energy by only using air-conditioning in the peak months of December and January. In shoulder times they use two large extraction exhaust fans which owner Kris Anderson says is a much more energy efficient way to cool the shop. 

 

“They just need to be appropriately sized for the space – in our 80 square meter shop we have two two-foot extraction fans (around 0.6 metres) and we use one and then two depending on how hot it is,” said Kris. “The cost is negligible compared to the cost of running air-conditioning, so we save a lot.”[6] 


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