[cercis]

You need to look at your particular fan to see which pushes air down. The info posted above is a general rule, but we had a great fan which was opposite that (thankfully it had a remote which told us with arrows which way the air would move).

When watering, use soaker hoses as much as possible. Cover them with mulch (more attractive), this will greatly cut down on evaporation.

Try to get used to a warmer house in the summer and a cooler house in the winter. The bonus (besides lower energy usage) is that you are more likely to actually do things outside if there isn't a huge difference between indoor and outdoor temps. We keep our house at 87 during the day and 84 at night. It's 100F outside, this means that outside is still 15 of so degrees warmer than inside, hot, but doable. Even DH (who would prefer to live in CO) has been able to adjust to the temps. In the winter, well, we only ran it once this year, but we do live in the subtropics. We keep it set at 62 or so.

Don't forget to change filters often.