<p>I live in a two story house in a generally pretty temperate California climate, but we have several heat waves each year and I’m never sure how best to keep the house cool since we don’t have AC. I generally keep everything shut tight during the day when no one is home, but should I be opening the skylights? Since heat rises would the warm air upstairs flow out? </p>
<p>I can also never know when to open up the windows and get fans going when we get home or on the weekends. Should I only open windows that are in the shade or can I put a fan in front of a sunny window and still cool things off due to air circulation.</p>
<p>I grew up in a part of San Francisco that didn’t have summer (we called it fog season) and have still never figured out how to deal with heat!</p>
<p>Although I live in a very different part of the country, I face a similar situation.</p>
<p>I have three skylights. Two do not open. When we open the the third, we are always sorry because ‘stuff’ (leaves, etc.) fall on the screen. It is a pain to clean. So we keep it closed.</p>
<p>We keep the windows open at night and in the morning until our indoor/outdoor thermometer tells us it is equal or hotter outside. We put the overhead and all standing fans on when we are home when necessary</p>
<p>It all seems to work pretty well because we have warm days and cool nights and not too much humidity. But things have been getting more humid the last five years. Luckily we have air conditioning in H and my room because of doctor’s order. I have adult onslaught allergies and was told “no open windows in bedroom.”</p>
<p>Hot air rises. If it’s cooler out than in, open the skylights and open some lower windows; it creates a chimney effect that sucks the cool air in and lets the hot air out.</p>
<p>I do not have skylights and I do have AC, but I’m cheap (frugal) and hate spending money on electricity to run the AC. First thing in the morning, when the house is warmer than the outdoors, I open every single door and window and run the bathroom fans and the kitchen fan to circulate the air. It takes about 15 minutes to cool the house down to the outside temperature, and it doesn’t get warmer than it is outside until about 2 in the afternoon.</p>
<p>If you have a large enough house, you can look into getting a whole house fan. It’s basically a giant exhaust fan you put on the top floor of your house. Open all the windows in your house an inch or two, let that go guy for about 10 minutes, and it’s instantly about as cool as outside.</p>
<p>If it’s about as cool inside as outside and you just want to get air moving, then try setting up two fans on opposite sides of the house. Have one blow as an exhaust, and the other as an intake. This is the only thing that saved my roommate and I back in our sweltering dorm room that mercifully was a corner room, so we had two windows on different walls.</p>