Cooling the Congregation
There is nothing quite so uncomfortable as sitting in a building, no matter what it might be, for any length of time in the heat of the summer with no form of interior cooling available. While most church buildings are so designed as to remain relatively cool in the hot summer months, ante-rooms and offices attached to the church are not generally so well designed.
In order to keep people cool, there needs to be some kind of air cooling system in place. Unfortunately, the installation of large AC systems can be prohibitively expensive, especially for churches in localities with small congregations and similarly small budgets.
Portable Air Cooling
Luckily, there is a simple and often relatively inexpensive solution to the problem and one that has been adopted in a number of southwestern churches for their smaller rooms. That is buying in those small, portable air conditioning units that are powerful enough to keep a small to medium sized office cool without cutting into the budget both for purchase and day to day running.
We put our first one in nearly eight years ago and immediately benefitted from its rather incredible air cooling ability that was a most welcome addition for our secretary's office where we had four people working at any given time. The unit was placed near to a small window and the exhaust vent simply connected to an old window fan aperture that hadn't been used in years.
The cooler working atmosphere was a welcome respite to a particularly hot summer!
Avoiding the Heat
When the temperatures outdoors are climbing high and becoming uncomfortable, the last thing you want is to retreat into your church only for it to be as hot and sticky in there as it is outdoors. The answer is of course to have a good air conditioning system installed in there, but then you have the problem of the ongoing costs in huge power bills to contend with for the summer.
So you need a way to find a compromise between being comfortably cool on those steamy hot days and nights, while keeping your power bills manageable.
The sensible way to do this is instead of maintaining a huge AC system (which would naturally do a great job of keeping the entire building cool even on the hottest days and nights), to just cool those rooms in the building that are actually being used. For large buildings with many ante-rooms or offices, this is not really a viable option as people can be occupying every room in the place especially when there's a lot of work to be done.
But for smaller congregations, or in fact for domestic situations too where there are folks living in a smaller home where there are only couples or those who live on their own, there is a perfect solution in having one or two portable air conditioning units in place of a whole house AC system.
The Benefits of Portable Vent Free Air Coolers
The benefits are easy to see as these small, low power units are great for keeping a single room cool while not using nearly so much power to do it as a larger system. That's because a larger system has to keep all the rooms cool, including the ones that no one is occupying and that is simply a waste of power and akin to throwing money down the drain.
The beauty of a smaller evaporative cooler is that it uses no more than a standard light bulb's worth of energy to work its magic and there is no need to vent to the outside. Being totally portable, when you have finished using one room, you simply wheel it into another room and cool that down ready for enjoying a comfortable time spent in a cool room.
If there are people who tend to use separate rooms, then simply obtain two portable units and still reap the benefits of lower power bills with this economical solution to keeping yourself cool when the weather is hot. The initial outlay for two small portable devices is way less than having a big AC system installed and of course the ongoing running costs are also a lot less.
This is simple common sense and a choice that many people make over the larger systems purely based on economics and common sense. There are several types of portable ACs that are available to buy and you can get some great discounts when you buy them from stores online that are able to provide you with great delivery deals as well, saving you having to make the journey to a physical store.
For further information on climate control devices such as swamp coolers (see: https://portableswampcoolers.com) and how they can be a useful and affordable option for smaller church rooms and offices that cannot benefit from the main building's more comfortable design, here is an excellent informational resource on portable air conditioners, vent free and low running cost that is kind to the environment.