Help & Support

What does AC Savings actually do?

It reads today’s weather for your city and tells you one number: the highest temperature you can set your air conditioner to and still be comfortable. Setting a higher number means the compressor runs less, and that is where the saving comes from. On hotter days the number goes down, on milder days it goes up.

You set the number by hand on your own remote. The app does not control your unit and does not need to.

Do I need a smart air conditioner, a smart plug, or any other hardware?

No. AC Savings works with any air conditioner, including old window units and units with a plain dial. There is nothing to install, pair, or buy. This is deliberate: the app is aimed at the units most people actually own, not at the small minority that are internet-connected.

What do I need to set up?

Setup asks for four things, and takes about a minute:

• your city, so the app can read the right weather;
• your air-conditioning unit, including whether it is inverter or non-inverter and its horsepower;
• your electricity rate, so savings can be shown in money rather than kilowatt-hours; and
• the temperature you used to set, which becomes the baseline your savings are measured against.

My unit has a dial with no numbers on it.

Choose the dial option during setup. The app then guides you by notches instead of degrees, for example “turn it from 3 to 4”, and calibrates against the notch you normally find comfortable at night.

Because a notch is not a precise unit, savings for dial units are always shown as a range rather than a single figure. The app treats one notch as roughly 2 °C, and carries an honest spread of about 1.5 to 2.5 °C per notch through the calculation. See Section 3.

I have more than one air conditioner.

You can add several units in Settings, one per room. Each keeps its own type, size, and running hours, and each contributes to your total savings.

Why does setup need an internet connection?

Only to look up your city. The city list is held on our server rather than shipped inside the app, which keeps the download small and the first launch fast. Once you have picked your city it is stored on your device, and the rest of the app works without that lookup.

How is the number chosen?

The app takes the outdoor temperature and humidity forecast for your city and works out the warmest indoor setting that should still feel comfortable in those conditions. It then checks that against your unit, so the recommendation is a setting your air conditioner can realistically hold.

Why does the number change during the day?

Because the weather does. The app gives you a morning, afternoon, and night figure, and the night figure is usually higher: it is cooler outside, and most people sleep comfortably at a warmer setting than they would choose at noon.

Would 16° cool my room faster than 24°?

No, and this is the most common misunderstanding about air conditioners. Your unit does not cool harder because you asked for a colder number. It cools at one rate and simply runs until it reaches the target, so 16° and 24° cool the room at the same speed.

Setting 16° on a hot day is actively worse. The unit never reaches the target, so it never cycles off. Running flat out for hours lets the coil frost over, and a frosted coil restricts airflow, which slows cooling down. You end up with a room that cools no faster, a unit under constant strain, and a larger bill.

Setting a temperature the unit can actually reach lets it cycle normally, keeps air moving, and stops it grinding all day. That is the whole idea behind the app.

Can I tell it I prefer comfort over savings?

Yes. Settings has a comfort-versus-savings preference. Leaning towards comfort produces slightly cooler recommendations and smaller estimated savings, and leaning towards savings does the opposite. The app never recommends a temperature it considers uncomfortable for the conditions.

The recommendation feels too warm for me.

Comfort is personal, and it varies with humidity, airflow, what you are wearing, and what you are used to. Move the comfort preference towards comfort, and if a particular number does not work for you, set what feels right. Even landing one degree above your old habit is a real saving.

How is the saving calculated?

The app compares two things: what your old habit would have cost, and what following today’s recommendation costs. The difference is your estimated saving. It uses your unit, your running hours, your days per week, and your own electricity rate, not a generic national average.

How much does one degree actually save?

The app works on roughly 5% of the unit’s cooling energy per °C for inverter units and about 3% per °C for non-inverter units. If you have told it you are not sure which you own, it uses 4% and widens the estimate accordingly.

The calculation is also capped: the app will never claim you saved more than 60% of your unit’s energy, no matter what the arithmetic produces. That ceiling exists to stop an unusual combination of settings turning into a number nobody should believe.

Why is my saving shown as a range instead of one number?

Ranges appear in two cases:

• Dial units. Notches are not degrees, so the app carries the uncertainty through instead of pretending to a precision it does not have.
• Unknown unit size.If you did not tell the app your unit’s horsepower, it widens the estimate by about 15% either side.

Filling in your unit’s horsepower in Settings will narrow the range.

I changed my electricity rate. What happens to past months?

Closed months keep the rate they were actually billed at, so your history does not silently rewrite itself. A new rate applies from the day you set it onwards.

Are these figures my real bill?

No, and the app labels them as estimates throughout. They are a model of your cooling costs, not a meter reading. Your real bill also includes every other appliance, your utility’s tariff structure and adjustments, the condition of your unit, and how well your home holds heat.

Treat the ledger as a measure of the habit, not a prediction of the bill. The full wording is in Section 17 of our Privacy Policy.

What will the app send me?

Two things, both optional and both off until you turn them on:

• The morning digest. Your plan for the day, once a day, at a time you choose.
• Change alerts. Sent only when the recommendation moves enough to be worth acting on.

Will it nag me?

No. Change alerts are deliberately conservative. A small movement does not trigger anything, a change that the next forecast hour contradicts is suppressed rather than sent, alerts are rate-limited so you cannot get a run of them, and quiet hours are respected so nothing arrives overnight.

I turned notifications on but nothing arrives.

Work through these in order:

• Check notifications are enabled for AC Savings in your phone’s system settings, not just in the app.
• Check your digest time has not already passed for today.
• Check whether battery saver or low-power mode is active. Both can delay or suppress scheduled notifications, on Android in particular.
• Open the app once. It refreshes its schedule when you do.

How do I turn them off?

Switch them off individually in Settings, or turn off notifications for AC Savings entirely in your phone’s settings. Declining notifications does not restrict any other part of the app.

Can I change my city, currency, units, or language?

Yes, all of them, at any time in Settings. You can switch between °C and °F, change the display currency, change language and region, and set the appearance to light, dark, or automatic.

Where is my data stored?

On your phone. There are no accounts and no cloud copy, so your history is not backed up to any server we operate. Section 4 of the Privacy Policy lists exactly what is stored.

How do I delete everything?

Clear your data in Settings, or delete the app. Because everything is local, uninstalling removes all of it and leaves no account or cloud copy behind.

Do you sell my data?

No. There is no advertising, no analytics, no tracking, and no third-party analytics or crash-reporting software in the app. See the Privacy Policy.

City search says I am offline.

City search needs a connection, because the city list lives on our server. Check your connection and use “Try again”. If you are definitely online and it still fails, our lookup service may be temporarily unavailable. Email us and we will check it.

Today’s weather or recommendation will not load.

The app keeps a short cache of recent weather, so a brief outage usually passes unnoticed. If the recommendation is stale, open the app while connected so it can refresh. Weather comes from a third-party service and can occasionally be unavailable.

My savings look far too high or too low.

Almost always one of these four inputs:

• the baseline, meaning the temperature you told the app you used to set;
• your running hours and days per week;
• your electricity rate; or
• your unit’s horsepower and whether it is inverter or non-inverter.

Check those in Settings first. Correcting the baseline resolves most reports.

I reinstalled the app and my history is gone.

Deleting the app deletes its local database, and there is no cloud backup to restore from. This is the direct trade-off for storing nothing about you on a server. Your phone’s own device-level backup may include app data, depending on your settings, but that is controlled by Apple or Google rather than by us.

If none of the above solves it, email [email protected].

To get a useful answer on the first reply, include:

• your device and operating system version;
• your city;
• what you expected to happen and what happened instead; and
• a screenshot, which is usually the fastest route to a diagnosis.

We reply within one business day in most cases.