In the hot summer months, Jose Verdugo had a strategy for how to best cool the mobile home he shared with his wife: turn on the window air conditioner in one room for an hour or two when just coming home, turn on the ceiling fans and open all the doors.
“Cool it off, and it will be ok for a couple more hours before you have to turn it on again,” Verdugo said. “We’re really frugal, and we got a swamp cooler. We only ran the AC unit like a couple hours during the course of the day just to get cooler.”
Most months in the summer of 2024, his electricity bill was somewhere around $60 a month…