Happy Summer Solstice! 7 ways to trim your summer energy bill.

Summer solstice is here, and your  home energy costs will rise right along with the temperature. Here are seven easy ways to keep cool and save money on your energy bill.

7. Change air conditioning filters

Josh Armstrong /Staff/File
air conditioning window units dot an apartment building in Boston in this 2005 file photo. Changing out your air conditioner's filter every four to eight weeks will help it run more efficiently .

A dirty air conditioner filter decreases your system's efficiency and increases the cost to run it. Remove the old filter, take note of the size, and purchase a bulk package from your local home improvement center. Aim to change the filter at least every four to eight weeks.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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