Using Weather to Maximise Efficiency at Home & in Business

Our daily lives have gotten busier and busier over the last few decades. Whether you are working in an office or college, everybody’s schedules are jam-packed with chores and responsibilities. Any disruption to this schedule can set us back in our work for days or even weeks. This is why time-management has become peoples’ number one priority across the world.

If you want to maximize the amount of time you have, you have to factor in every element that affects your day to day lives. One of the most uncontrollable things that affect us is the weather. The weather can play havoc with school, college, work, and business schedules. If your Amazon package has ever been delayed, it’s probably because the logistics company didn’t factor in weather-related delays! So how can we minimize this impact?

Table of Contents

Weather Monitoring

To minimize how much the weather affects us, our first step should be to monitor the weather. Weather monitoring is done across the world using high-tech weather stations, scientific projects, and weather stations. We receive this information from various avenues like TV weather forecasts, newspapers, and recently, app.

These weather monitoring avenues give us weather forecasts about the projected weather that day. Then we use our own judgment and experience to estimate how this forecast is likely to affect us. Weather monitoring is also used to predict environmental changes as well, which can have a significant impact on large industries like the agriculture and animal husbandry industry.

Weather Intelligence

Weather forecasts are limited in their applications. There are so many ways that the weather affects us that it is impossible for individuals to keep track of everything. For weather forecasts to help us mitigate hurdles in our daily lives, we have to look to weather intelligence. Weather intelligence is the next step after simple weather forecasts.

Weather intelligence takes into account the changes to the weather at global and hyperlocal levels. It also tracks the many ways it can impact your life, like traffic delays, transportation delays, and even downturns in sales. This can go a long way in helping you make decisions as you arrange your day. So what are the different ways knowing this will help you?

Travel Time

One of the first things that get affected when the weather takes a turn for the worse is the traffic. There are, of course, traffic monitoring systems that give live updates from apps and even the radio. But these cannot tell you if delays are going to be expected. Instead, choose services that rely on weather monitoring to tell you about expected traffic delays. This way, you can end unimportant events early to make sure you have enough time to get to important meetings and events.

Travel time can be travel time to and from your workplace, or even train and plane travel. Travel agents can use weather intelligence to provide better support for their clients. Doing this adds a level of refinement to the services they provide and can help with customer satisfaction, customer retention and help with building relationships with them as well.

Transportation

Working in logistics is challenging. There are so many checkpoints where you can run into problems that delays are inevitable. Using weather intelligence, you can use pertinent information to make smart decisions about your operations. For example, suppose the air quality along one of your routes has hazardous air quality due to a wildfire.

Weather intelligence will not only tell you about the delays you might experience but also inform you about also give you an estimate when you could be back on track. This way, you can convey your apologies to customers while telling them why your deadlines need to be pushed back. This can go a long way in building trust and relationships between business partners.

Events

For both attendees and event-planners, it is a significant loss when the weather plays spoilsport. People spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to organize outdoor events. For event-planners, it is a lot of capital investment that you don’t want to see washed away or snowed in. The weather can play spoilsport during the preparation period, too, delaying preparedness for the main event.

Instead, planners can use weather-intelligence to plan daily operations. We tried ClimaCell’s weather site and saw we could get updates on the best time to schedule events, alerts of upcoming weather events, and more that were immensely helpful. Suppose you are going to an outdoor event, especially something like a music festival. In that case, you could know to carry weatherproof clothing and other protections that will ensure you enjoy the event despite the rains!

The Most Efficient Way to Run Your AC During a Heat Wave

With a heat dome bringing record-breaking temperatures for 170 million Americans this week and most of the U.S. gearing up for a hotter than average summer, many might be inclined to stay inside and crank up the AC.

But air conditioning has a big environmental footprint. “Air conditioners are not the most climate friendly solutions because they’re extremely energy intensive, they use a whole order of magnitude more electricity than fans, and because they’re so energy guzzling, they place quite a large strain on the [fossil fuel] electricity grid,” says Radhika Khosla, associate professor at the Smith school of enterprise and environment at Oxford University.

Air conditioning accounts for 7% of global electricity and 3% of carbon emissions—the International Energy Agency estimates that electricity for cooling produced 1 billion metric tons of CO2 in 2022. That’s roughly equivalent to Japan’s annual emissions. During heat waves, when everyone is cranking down the temperature, cooling demands can put significant strains on energy systems.

However, that doesn’t mean you have to suffer through the sweltering heat. Experts say that, during a heat wave, there are ways to both keep cool and reduce your environmental impact.

Make sure your unit is clean

If your air conditioning system is not well-maintained, it will block the flow of air, and require more energy to run, says Yunho Hwang co-director of the Center for Environmental Energy Engineering at University of Maryland. “If the filter is not [clean], then air flow rate will be decreased, and that means the inefficient operation of the cooling system and so on.”

“Pre-cool” your home

Hwang suggests pre-cooling your home four to six hours before peak temperatures. Starting from a lower base temperature helps reduce the amount of energy needed to cool your home before the heat outside makes things too uncomfortable—doing so also reduces the energy demands on power grids during peak hours. “Because the building has a larger thermal mass, your building can hold the coolness for a while,” he says. If your system has one, you can also use a timer to ensure your air conditioning isn’t running beyond what’s needed, especially if you’re not home.

Decarbonize your grid

Many electric grids are run on fossil fuels, which emit greenhouse gasses. By using fossil fuels to power ACs, only worsens the global warming that is causing the surge in demand for air conditioning.

“We’re therefore stuck in a vicious cycle where you have air conditioning use as a way to [adapt] against heat, but that same mitigation solution is one that is actually causing the problem and exacerbating it,” says Khosla.

But fossil fuels are not the only option. Many utility companies in the U.S. are beginning to offer consumers the option to switch to green energy suppliers. Widespread adoption of grid decarbonization would help significantly reduce the emissions of air conditioning, especially when coupled with a wind down of climate-warming gases used in cooling equipment, according to a 2023 Global Cooling Watch report published by the United Nations, on which Khosla was a lead author.

Consider other options

There are many other ways to keep cool and prevent your AC from working overtime. If your home gets a lot of sun, think about drawing the blinds or curtains to stop excess heat from entering.

Make sure you have ventilation, whether you’re running a fan or cracking open a window. “Always use a ceiling fan…because that helps for air circulation around people, and also that cools down your body so that you don’t need to lower the room temperature as low,” says Hwang.

As global temperatures continue to rise, it’s imperative that we rethink how we address and manage heat. “Our response to extreme heat is going to be one that will need to be holistic, and it cannot be one where one solely relies on the air conditioner, because that is not going to be a long term solution,” says Khosla. “The more awareness and investments that can be made up front in infrastructural design solutions and in technological approaches around energy efficiency, the more resilient we’re going to be in mitigating and adapting to these extreme temperatures that are coming.”

https://www.computertechreviews.com/using-weather-to-maximise-efficiency/

https://time.com/7295554/efficient-air-conditioning-heat-wave/