Keeping Chin's cage cool?

[Morganpanda]

We moved into this beautiful place. It's lovely, twice the size of our last place, and it has these enormous, huge windows that just leak in natural light.

It's a wonderful thing, until we've realized that this "natural light" feature is messing with our internal temperatures, especially being in Florida. We keep the AC running at 71, and it's constantly running and combating between the hot sun and our AC (and the bill >.<), and it's just not really very possible to retain it at 71. We've seen the "natural" internal temperature go up to 76 at some points.

I have a fan in the main room where the chinchilla is that circulates the air flow and makes it feel a little cooler. The chin has a marble plate that he can sit and lay on, but he rarely really uses it. We have these frozen ice packs that are sealed in fleece "pillow cases" (basically I sewed pockets and snap them together to keep the ice pack away from the chin, but providing a cooling pillow for the chin to sit on... I don't think he's really using them.

We're having out AC looked at later this week because it does get hot pretty quickly in the place. Help? Especially for this hot summer up ahead?

 

[ticklechin]

Pick a small room and put in a window a/c unit, that is what I did.

 

[Dreamlite]

I agree. Get a window unit and ac just one room to get the temp down. A fan does nothing since chins can't sweat. A good working ac unit is a must if you own chinchillas.

 

[Morganpanda]

A window AC unit isn't quite an option as much as we'd like to have one. The windows in the new place aren't the normal AC window type. Especially in the room that we have the chin in. All of the windows are from the floor to the ceiling. We're getting darker curtains to block out the sun more and my husband is looking into getting someone to put this film on the windows that won't block the amazing view, but will block some of the UV rays and keep the place more insulated.

A fan can circulate the air. It's not meant to cool them off, it's meant to keep a good circulation of the cool air coming in.

Thanks so much for the suggestions.
I'll see what we can do as far as getting the one room AC controlled a little bit better. I'm sure they have to sell portable AC units for either large windows (though, might get expensive if we have to customize the glass...) or even for rooms that can't have the window AC units.

I'll do some more research.