How to Use Air Conditioners Wisely and Avoid "Electricity Bill Bombs"

[Anchor]

While the weather is hard to bear without air conditioning, electricity bills remain a major concern. Take a moment to check the label on your air conditioner. Depending on whether it is an inverter model with varying power consumption, the methods to reduce cooling costs differ.

Reporter Kwon Ran has the details.

[Reporter]

Air conditioning is a summer essential, but worries about electricity bills follow right behind.

[Shim Young-bun / Banghwa-dong, Seoul: It is unspeakable. It gets hot from the morning, so I bought (the air conditioner) thinking about the one that would use less electricity.]

However, operating your air conditioner properly can help you avoid massive electricity bills.

First, for inverter-type air conditioners, once they reach the target temperature, they switch to low-power operation, making it more efficient to keep them running while maintaining the same temperature.

On the other hand, older constant-speed models operate their outdoor units repeatedly even after reaching the set temperature, so turning them off briefly after about two hours of use helps save electricity.

For inverter-type air conditioners, it is more advantageous to leave them on when leaving home for less than 90 minutes.

In experiments, turning off the air conditioner for 30 minutes and turning it back on increased power consumption by 5%, and by 2% for 60 minutes, but for 90 minutes, power consumption actually decreased by 1%.

You should close not only the windows but also the doors of unused rooms.

When an air conditioner was turned on in a house with a living room area of 43 square meters, closing one room door reduced power usage by 35%, and closing two doors reduced it by 46%.

The most appropriate setting temperature is 26°C (79°F).

Raising the temperature by 1 degree from 24°C (75°F) to 25°C (77°F) saves 13% of electricity, and raising it by 2 degrees to 26°C (79°F) can save 22%.

Cleaning the filter is also essential.

[Lee Kyung-joo / Group Leader, HVAC Product Planning Group, Samsung Electronics: If you do not clean the filter, power consumption increases by an average of about 3 to 5 percent.]

You can also receive cash back by reducing power consumption.

Cashback is paid out even if you reduce your electricity usage by just 1% compared to the average electricity usage of the same month over the previous two years.

[Moon Ah-hyun / Deputy Head, Demand Efficiency Division, Korea Electric Power Corporation: Last year, 1.66 million households participated and saved a total of 337 GWh of electricity, which is the amount of power that all households in Chungju could use for a year.]

KEPCO is also operating an AI-powered alert service that warns users via KakaoTalk messages and other channels if power usage is expected to increase significantly.

(Photo courtesy of Yonhap News / Video reported by Kim Young-hwan, Video edited by Yoon Tae-ho, Graphics by Kang Yoon-jung, Park Chun-woong, Seo Seung-hyun, Seo Hyun-jung)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.