Five ways to cut your air conditioning bill this summer
Our air conditioning is costing a fortune over summer. What can we actually do about it?
Published 23/09/2026. Written by the Pristine Cooling team, Kalgoorlie.
None of these cost you anything. Set the temperature once then leave it alone, get ahead of the heat instead of chasing it, stop cooling the building when nobody is in it, keep the condenser clear, then shut the doors. Every one is about making the air conditioning work less hard rather than work better, which is where the money goes in a Kalgoorlie summer. The two things people normally try first are at the bottom, because both make it worse.
1. Stop fighting the thermostat
Setting it to sixteen does not cool the room faster.
An air conditioner has one speed of cooling. The setpoint is not a throttle, it is a finish line. Set it to sixteen and the system does not work harder, it just keeps going long after the room was comfortable, then keeps going some more.
What that costs you is every degree below what anyone actually wanted. A room at a sensible temperature all day will always cost less than a room that gets driven down to sixteen then propped open because it is too cold.
Pick a setpoint the room is happy at, put it there, leave it. If staff keep moving it, that is a conversation rather than an equipment problem. On a lot of sites a lockable controller or a limited range is worth more than any other change on this list.
2. Get ahead of the heat
Run it before the day gets away from you.
A system rejecting heat into forty two degree air is doing the hardest work it will ever do. The same system doing the same job at seven in the morning, into air half that temperature, moves the heat far more easily.
So on a building that opens at nine, starting the plant at seven and pulling the space down while it is still cool outside costs less than starting at nine then fighting the afternoon. The building holds that coolness for a while, because the slab and the stock and the fitout all store it.
The reverse also matters. A building left to bake all weekend takes most of Monday to recover, which is a Monday spent running flat out.
3. Stop cooling an empty building
The single most wasted money in commercial air conditioning is plant running for nobody.
Worth actually checking rather than assuming:
- What time does the plant start, what time does it stop, does anyone know
- Does it run through the weekend
- Does it run over the Christmas shutdown
- Was the schedule set for the trading hours you had three years ago
- If the building has zones, is anything cooling a storeroom or a back office
that nobody has sat in since autumn
Schedules get set once at handover then never touched again while the business changes around them. Going and reading what the controller is actually set to, against what the building actually does now, is twenty minutes that often finds more than everything else here put together.
4. Let the condenser breathe
The condenser is the outdoor part that throws the heat away. It does that by pulling air across fins. Choke the fins or choke the air, then the heat has nowhere to go, so the system runs longer to do the same job.
Out here that happens quickly. Red dust packs into a coil over a season. Grease does the same near a kitchen extract. Then there is everything stacked around it: a pallet, a bin, a delivery left in front of the unit, shade cloth put up by somebody trying to help.
Go and look at yours. If you cannot see light through the fins, you have found something. There is more on why this matters in your cool room is not holding temperature, which is the same principle on refrigeration gear.
Filters are the indoor half of the same story. A blocked filter starves the system of air, so it runs longer, then eventually ices up.
5. Shut the door
Obvious, routinely ignored, genuinely expensive.
A shop front propped open in February is an air conditioner cooling Boulder Road. A roller door left up at the back of a workshop is the same. So is a pair of double doors held open with a fire extinguisher because the deliveries are easier that way.
If a door has to stay open for the way the business runs, that is a design question rather than a habit question, then it has a proper answer: an air curtain, a vestibule, strip curtains on the back. Those are worth pricing against what the open door costs every summer.
Then there is the rest of the envelope. Gaps under doors, a broken window seal, a ceiling hatch left open into a hot roof space, an extract fan running that nobody needed on. Anything moving air out of the building is pulling hot air in to replace it, which is the same conversation as ventilation.
The two things that do not work
Buying a bigger unit. A system that is too big for the space cools it quickly, shuts off, then starts again shortly after. That short cycling uses more power than running steadily, wears the compressor faster, then never runs long enough to pull moisture out of the air. Bigger is not cooler. It is just more expensive twice.
Closing the vents in a ducted system. It feels like it should send more air to the rooms you care about. What it actually does is raise the pressure in the ductwork against a fan that was sized for the whole system being open. On a system without proper zoning that means more strain, more noise, sometimes a frozen coil. If you want rooms shut off, that is what zoning does, which is a change worth making properly rather than by closing grilles.
The one you cannot do yourself
Everything above is yours, this week, with nobody attending.
The plant itself is not. Whether the charge is right, whether the coils are clean rather than clean looking, whether the controller is still doing what its label says. A system running quietly outside its design costs you a little every day it does, then picks February to fail rather than June.
So do the five first. Read what the controller is actually set to, go and look at the condenser, shut the doors. If the bills still look wrong after that, the building is telling you something a thermostat cannot, which is worth having someone look at before the hot end of summer rather than during it.
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