How to Keep Your Home Cool During a West Michigan Heat Wave

We don't get many stretches of extreme heat in West Michigan, but when a heat wave rolls in off the lake with humidity behind it, the phone starts ringing. Usually it's some version of the same thing: the AC is running all day and the house still feels warm. Sometimes that's a real problem. A lot of the time, the system is doing its job and just needs some help from the rest of the house.

Your air conditioner is built to hold your home roughly 20 degrees cooler than it is outside. On a 95-degree day, that math means low-to-mid 70s is a stretch, and the harder you push the setpoint, the longer it runs. So the goal during a heat wave isn't to crank the thermostat down. It's to keep heat out and let the AC win the fight it can actually win. Here's how.

Block the Sun Before It Gets In

A big chunk of the heat load in your house comes straight through the windows. West and south-facing rooms take the worst of it in the afternoon.

• Close blinds and curtains on the sunny side during the day. This alone can knock a noticeable amount of heat out of a room.
• Keep the worst windows covered with blackout curtains or cellular shades if you have rooms that turn into ovens every afternoon.
• Consider the outside too. A tree, an awning, or even a temporary shade over a bare west-facing window keeps the sun off the glass before it becomes your problem.

None of this is dramatic on its own, but shading the house takes real load off the system so it isn't fighting the sun and the outdoor temperature at the same time.

Stop Making Heat Indoors

Every appliance that makes heat is working against your AC. During a heat wave, time the big ones for the cooler parts of the day.

• Skip the oven. Cook outside on the grill, use the stovetop, or lean on the microwave and slow cooker. A hot oven can raise the temperature in the kitchen by several degrees.
• Run the dishwasher and dryer at night, or early morning, not in the afternoon when the house is already straining.
• Use your exhaust fans. The bathroom and kitchen fans pull heat and humidity out when you shower or cook. Humidity is half the battle in West Michigan, and your AC has to work to remove it.

Use Fans to Buy Yourself Degrees

A ceiling or box fan doesn't lower the room temperature, but it moves air across your skin so you feel cooler. With a fan going, most people are comfortable a couple degrees warmer, which lets you set the thermostat up and give the AC a break.

Two rules make fans actually pay off. Set ceiling fans to spin counterclockwise in summer so they push air down at you. And turn them off when you leave the room, because a fan cooling nobody is just a small heater running up the bill. There's more on this in our guide to lowering your AC bills.

Don't Fight the Thermostat

When it's brutally hot, the instinct is to shove the setpoint way down to force the house cooler faster. It doesn't work that way. Your AC cools at a steady rate no matter where you set the thermostat, so setting it to 68 just means it runs flat-out for hours and still might not get there.

Pick a realistic target, around 78 when you're home, and leave it. If you're heading out, bump it up 5 to 7 degrees rather than shutting the system off. Letting the house soak up heat all day means a long, expensive recovery when you get back. A programmable or smart thermostat handles this without you thinking about it.

One more thing worth checking: a fresh air filter. A clogged filter chokes airflow right when the system needs to move as much air as possible, and it's the most common reason a healthy AC underperforms in the heat.

Give the Outdoor Unit Room to Breathe

Your condenser, the unit outside, dumps your home's heat into the outdoor air. If it can't breathe, it can't do that, and cooling drops off fast on a hot day. Walk out and check it.

• Clear grass clippings, leaves, and cottonwood fluff off the fins.
• Pull weeds and trim back anything growing within a couple feet of it.
• Make sure nobody stacked patio furniture or a kiddie pool against it.

If the fins are caked with gunk, a gentle rinse with a garden hose from the inside out helps. We go deeper on this in our post on cleaning the outdoor unit. If some rooms stay hot no matter what you do, that's usually an airflow or duct issue, which we cover in why some rooms run hotter than others.

Know When It's Not the Weather

Most heat-wave complaints come down to a healthy system being asked to do too much. But some are real failures, and a heat wave is exactly when they show up because the system is under the most stress.

Call us if the AC blows warm air, ices over, trips the breaker, or simply can't hold anywhere near your setpoint while running constantly. Those are signs of low refrigerant, an electrical fault, or a failing part, not just a hot day. We keep room in the summer schedule for AC repair because a dead system in July isn't something that can wait.