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Summer is approaching (though from the unseasonably cool temperatures here, you could have fooled me) and with the approach of summer means summer cooling bills. Many, many households across the United States will be trying to maximize the cooling they can get from their central air units, window air conditioning, and fans in order to minimize their energy bills.

There are a number of steps that are often tossed out there as “standard” advice, such as installing a programmable thermostat, finding the upper limit of what you can tolerate inside, opening windows in the night time to let in cooler air, closing the curtains and/or blinds to block direct sunlight, and so on.

In fact, I listed several of these tips in a recent article, Seven Simple Tactics We Use to Keep Summer Energy Bills Low.

Whenever a person makes a significant change in their life, some things are gained and some things are lost. Ideally, the things that are gained outweigh the things that are lost, but that doesn’t mean that the exchange was purely positive.

When changing one’s life, there are some things that are left behind. During the process of changing our financial direction, we lost several things in our lives.

We lost friends. I was pretty tight with a circle of young professionals that would sometimes drink after work and sometimes engage in other expensive activities. Once I became aware of my finances, I was astounded as to how much this group was really costing me, so I inched away from it. I still stay in touch with a few people from those days, but most of the rest are lost to the mists of time.

Sarah and I argue about politics sometimes. We have different perspectives on a lot of political issues and sometimes that will cause us to have rather vigorous debates on things. I tend to be more concerned about civil liberties than Sarah is, for example, and our different feelings on civil liberties and privacy caused us to have more than a few disagreements about Edward Snowden and Wikileaks, for example.

At the end of the day, though, we still care for each other deeply. Our political disagreements – or my disdain for Sarah’s taste in movies or her eye-rolling at my constant suggestion to play more board games – aren’t what makes up the basics of our relationship.

Our relationship is based on other things. We agree fundamentally on how to treat other people. We agree on how to parent our children and how important it is to communicate with each other. We also agree on how to use the resources we share – our money being a major part of that.

During the winter, we use a number of tactics for maximizing the effectiveness of our energy use. In Iowa, winters can get quite cold – we reached -20 F at our home several times this winter – and knowing how to maximize the energy that your furnace uses can make a huge difference when the energy bill comes.

Now that we’re heading toward summer, the goal is a little different. We want to avoid running the air conditioning and, if we can, find other ways to cut down on our energy spending by taking advantage of summer.

Here are seven things we do to keep our energy bills in check during the warmer months of the year.