The cooking marathon that precedes a Thanksgiving celebration can leave your home feeling too warm and stuffy if you don’t take steps to promote good kitchen ventilation. Here are some effective ways to ensure that your family and guests enjoy your delicious Thanksgiving meal in greater comfort this year:
Use Your Kitchen Exhaust Fan
Preparing a holiday turkey, sides, and desserts in the oven and cooktop can send a lot of humidity and grease particles into your indoor air. You can send the moisture and fumes straight outdoors by running the kitchen exhaust fan while you’re cooking. Doing so can also help remove excess heat so the kitchen and adjacent areas like the dining room don’t become uncomfortably hot and sticky.
Take Advantage of Natural Ventilation
Heat energy naturally migrates towards a cooler space, so if it’s cooler outdoors than inside your home, open up a few windows to help get rid of the extra warmth and moisture that’s created when you’re cooking a big meal.
Run Your Air Conditioner
If you’ve taken steps to promote good kitchen ventilation, but your home still feels too hot and humid, switch on your central air conditioner a couple of hours before your guests arrive. Just make sure you’ve closed any open windows, and that your registers and doors to seldom-used rooms are open to prevent any airflow restrictions.
Turn on Your Ceiling Fans
If Thanksgiving day isn’t quite warm enough to warrant running the A/C, or you want to create extra cooling air movement to make your guests more comfortable, turn on the ceiling fans in the areas you’re entertaining in – like the dining, family or living rooms.
Move Your Meal Prep Outside
Rather than having to deal with kitchen ventilation concerns and trying to entertain your guests in an uncomfortably stuffy home, why not do your cooking outside and use a fryer and/or grill to prepare your Thanksgiving turkey and side dishes?
If you’re concerned about kitchen ventilation issues affecting comfort in your Yuma home this Thanksgiving, contact us at Hansberger Refrigeration and Electric Company for personalized advice and solutions.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Yuma, Arizona about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Guide or call us at 928-723-3183.