One aspect of cooling I covered only briefly in past articles is using reflection to cool your home. Much of the heat one gets in a home, comes through the bright hot sun pouring heat into the rooms. Now in the Winter this "solar gain" is what you wish to augment and I have articles which describe Heat Catchers which use sun light for part of home heating.

But in the summer you want to reflect the heat away. You can do this several ways.

1) You can hang aluminum foil in back of the curtains to refect the heat back outside. This is the most effective method.

2) You can hang white or light colored curtain liners or shades in back of your window treatments. White also reflects light, but not as effectively as shiney metal.

If you place these in your windows you should notice a noticible drop in room temperature. It can be as much as 20 degrees cooler than before. I know for certain this is true. We have a unheated attic that we use a Heat Catcher in the winter to keep it above freezing. I got busy and did not remove it from the attic window. It was over 100 F degrees up there! However, when I turned it around so the reflective side was facing the "sunny side" and the temperature dropped quickly over 20 degrees F less than before.

So apply this technique as well as those in my past cooling articles and have a cool summer!