Everyone needs a good night’s sleep to have a healthy, happy and productive life. If we don’t get the rest that we need during the night, it can have a dramatic effect on our overall health and well being. When the weather turns hotter, it can be very difficult to relax, and our sleep can suffer. Many people install an air conditioning system to improve their indoor comfort levels, but they don’t understand how to use their AC systems at night. In this article, we will take a closer look at how you can tweak your air conditioning system to help you to get a great night’s sleep.
Staying Cool and Comfortable
When you start to get tired, and you’re preparing for sleep, your body will naturally drop your temperature to help you to relax. When you have a bedroom that is cooled this process will be even more beneficial, and you may enjoy a deeper and more restful night of rest. The National Sleep Foundation has stated that the ideal bedroom temperature for the best sleep is somewhere between 60ºF-67ºF.
Reaching this bedroom sleeping temperature is easy during the colder winter months. In fact, setting a bedroom temperature in this range would even save money on your heating bills. But, if you want to enjoy these sleeping temperatures during the summer months, it could be prohibitively expensive. So, how do you keep the temperature lower without driving up your energy bills to unacceptable levels?
When you need to stay cooler during the hottest summer nights, it’s a great idea to use a zone control air conditioning system. This will allow you to set your thermostat to deliver different levels of cooling to individual zones or rooms. Using a system like this would allow you to set those cooler temperatures in just the bedroom without cooling the entire home at the same time. This would let you get the cooler night of sleep at a fraction of the cost of cooling the whole home.
Fans are Your Friends
When many homeowners invest in an air conditioning system they often forget all about their ceiling or floor mounted fans. This is a mistake, although fans are not a very effective way to cool your home, they are very good at moving air around. If you’ve cooled or even heated the air in your home to make it more comfortable a fan can help you to circulate that treated air more effectively. This can make your room feel cooler or warmer, and it can prevent the treated air from gathering or pooling at the ceiling or in other areas.
A fan is a great addition for your summer bedtime routine, and the breeze will undoubtedly make you feel cooler. A fan is far cheaper to run than your air conditioning, and it will enhance the effects of your bedroom cooling. The ideal cool sleeping temperature will be easier to achieve, and the circulation of the air will make the room feel fresher. The feel of a light breeze gently touching your skin throughout the night will certainly help you to feel cool, comfortable and relaxed.
Another fringe benefit that could help some people to fall asleep is the sound that a fan makes. The steady white noise hum of the average ceiling or floor mounted fan can be extremely soothing. Some people even enjoy using a floor and ceiling fan together to get a cross breeze and because their main ceiling fan is too quiet. When you have a subtle white noise in the background, it can help to muffle any noise that could disturb your sleep in the middle of the night. So, dust of your fan(s) and try them out with your air conditioning to see if they help you to fall off into a deep cool sleep.
Humidity is a Factor
Many people are unaware that their air conditioning systems also act as a dehumidifier in their homes. Humidity can have a major effect on how a room feels, and this can really affect how well you sleep at night. If the humidity in your bedroom is too high, the air may feel muggy and thick, and this will make it harder to relax and breathe deeply.
When a room is humid, it can promote the growth of mold, this will irritate your respiratory system, it can also trigger allergic reactions, and this will interrupt your sleep. Many insects are attracted to and even thrive in humid environments, and this can also affect the quality of your sleep.
A room that’s too dry can also have a detrimental effect on the quality of your sleep. If the air is dry, your nasal passages and throat will feel scratchy and cracked making you uncomfortable. When you feel dry, you may need to get up in the middle of the night to drink more water, and this is also an unwanted interruption to your sleep.
As you can see, you don’t want your bedroom to be too humid or too dry because both of these situations can affect how you sleep at night. It’s important to have a good balance; the humidity level needs to be set at a level that you find comfortable. A digital hydrometer is an inexpensive purchase, and it’s the ideal way to measure the humidity in any room in your home. The ideal humidity for your bedroom should be somewhere between 40-50% for the best night’s sleep.
If you have a humidity level outside the ideal 40-50% range, you may have to adjust the humidity level in your bedroom to get the best night’s sleep. In most cases, a standalone humidifier or dehumidifier unit will be able to nudge the humidity into the optimal range for sleeping. Many modern humidifiers and dehumidifier systems also use silver particles and filtration systems to make your air even cleaner. These systems don’t cost too much to run, and the best ones have extensive programming options, so you don’t have to run them for the entire night.