Could Your Concrete Home Be Raising Your Light Bill?

Your electricity bill may be rising before you even switch on the air conditioner. Concrete homes offer valuable protection during hurricanes, but BEL says those same walls trap heat throughout the day and release it after sunset. That forces air-conditioning units to work harder and longer, adding an unseen cooling cost to homes and businesses. BEL’s General Manager of Energy Solutions, Karique Marin, explains.

 

Karique Marin, General Manager of Energy Solutions, BEL 

“Firstly, energy efficiency is key. When you consider energy efficiency, you look at lighting, look at your air conditioning, and look at closing up the gaps in which your air condition exits the room. In Belize, we really haven’t built for cooling. We build our structures a lot more for the hurricane. So everybody is considering, ‘oh, let me build concrete’. But the engineers will tell you that concrete is really, really bad when it comes to keeping in cool. In the evening time, you can touch your walls and you feel how hot it can get. And really, your air condition is being used to cool that wall first and also then the room. So that we have seen is a big part of an area in which we can save a lot of energy.  And therefore, energy efficiency is definitely the way to go. Changing the way in which you use energy, that’s energy efficiency. But also considering solar, that is an option for businesses. It does make sense in some cases, but it is very important that you do the analysis. That is extremely important. We have seen in some cases, projects do work and in other cases, projects fail. So it is very important that you do your analysis. Speak with BEL. BEL is open to coming and speaking with you both on energy efficiency and in looking at solar opportunities.”

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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