Cooling a house in Guyana is partly a design question and partly an electricity bill. This article answers the second one with a published tariff and leaves the first one as a list of things to look at, because that is what can be sourced. What it does not do is tell you how hot or how humid it is, or which part of town catches the breeze. Those sentences were in the draft this replaces, and none of them could be stood up.
What this page does not tell you about the weather
The Hydrometeorological Service is Guyana's national authority for climate data. Read on 24 October 2026, we could find no published climate normals for Georgetown from it that we could read and cite. The third-party climate sites that do publish figures disagree with one another, including on which months the rainy seasons fall in and on how much rain a month gets — one puts the wettest month in mid-year and another late in the year. So this article carries no temperature range, no humidity percentage and no rainy-season dates. The draft's 24 to 32 degrees and its humidity figure are gone for that reason, not because they sounded wrong. If you need normals, ask the Hydrometeorological Service for the series for your own station and ask which reference period it covers; a monthly average means something different over 1961 to 1990 than over 1991 to 2020.
And no neighborhood is described here as cooler, shadier or quieter than another. We have no measurement that would support it, and that kind of claim lands on real streets and the people who live on them. The draft named three. They are out, and the questions further down are what replaces them.
The tariff your cooling actually runs on
This is the figure that changes decisions, and it is published. Guyana Power and Light's tariff structure, residential class above 75 kWh a month:
- GYD 43.43 per kWh
- plus a standing charge of GYD 351.04 a month, billed whether or not any power is used
Both have been in force since 11 April 2021. That date is not stale data on our side: the Public Utilities Commission's six published orders on GPL between 2021 and 2026 are all annual reviews of operating standards and performance targets, and none of them changes a tariff. One caveat we carry rather than hide: GPL's own site states no currency anywhere. It is Guyana dollars, corroborated against the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Snapshot for Guyana, which puts residential power at about USD 0.20 per kWh, and the CCREEE Energy Report Card for Guyana, which gives USD 0.19 to 0.28 per kWh across the same twelve classes. Check your own bill against this before you budget on it.
Which tariff class you are in is on your bill, not in this article
The same published tariff has a second residential class, Lifeline, at GYD 39.10 per kWh with a standing charge of GYD 341.54 — and it applies to monthly consumption of 75 kWh or less. We are deliberately not telling you which class you are in. It is a consumption threshold, not a property type or an income band, your bill prints the class you are actually charged on, and a household that has decided to run air conditioning should price its power on the class above the threshold rather than on the lifeline rate. Quoting the lower rate to someone cooling a house would understate what they pay. Read the class off your own bill and use the matching rate.
Design: what to look at before you sign a lease
None of this needs a number, and none of it is a claim about any particular street or building. These are the questions a surveyor would ask on your behalf:
- Orientation. Which way do the rooms you will actually sit in face, and at what time of day does the sun reach their windows? Visit at that hour, not at ten in the morning.
- Cross-ventilation. Can windows on opposite walls of the same space be opened at the same time? One openable wall gives you a warm room with a draft at the window.
- The roof. Is it shaded, or light-colored, or both? Is there a ventilated roof space between the ceiling and the roof sheet, and can you see it? A top-floor unit under an unshaded roof is a different proposition from the same unit a floor down.
- External shading. Are the windows shaded from outside — overhangs, louvres, shutters, a veranda — rather than only curtained from inside? Shade that stops sunlight before it reaches the glass does more than any fabric behind it.
- Fans. Is there a ceiling fan already fitted, or only a wiring point and a promise?
- Trees that already exist. A tree standing on the plot shades the house now. One you plant does not, and we are not going to tell you how fast anything grows.
- The evidence. Ask the landlord for the last twelve months of GPL bills for the property. That is the only thing in this list that answers the cooling question with a measurement instead of an opinion, and a landlord who will not produce them has told you something too.
Habits that cost nothing
These are physical, not local, and none of them is a measured Guyanese saving:
- Open the house up when the outside air is cooler than the inside air, and shut it when it is not. The point is the direction of the difference, not the hour on the clock.
- Keep external shading closed on whichever side the sun is on, through the day.
- In a room with a cooling unit running, keep the door shut and a fan moving; air that leaves the room takes the cooling with it.
- Move the heat-making jobs — oven, dryer, ironing — out of the hours and the rooms you are trying to keep cool.
- Clean or replace the filters on whatever you run. A blocked filter spends power without delivering cooling, and it is the cheapest thing on this list to fix.
Air conditioning: what to ask, and the figure we will not give you
Ask a supplier for the rated power input in kilowatts, not only the cooling capacity in BTU, because the input is what meets the tariff above. Ask whether the compressor is an inverter type, what the warranty covers and who services it locally, and what the installer intends to do about the condensate drain and the wall penetration.
What we will not give you is an estimate of what a unit adds to your bill. That depends on the unit, the room, the insulation and the hours you run it, and we have no measured Guyanese figure for any of those. Measure it yourself instead, which takes one billing cycle: read the meter at the start and end of a month, do the same for a comparable month, and multiply the difference in kWh by the rate for your tariff class. That gives you your own number with your own house in it, which is worth more than anyone's published average.
What expats should know
- No climate figure appears in this article. The national authority publishes none we could read on 24 October 2026, and the third-party sites disagree.
- Electricity above 75 kWh a month is GYD 43.43 per kWh, plus GYD 351.04 standing charge, in force since 11 April 2021.
- The Lifeline rate applies at 75 kWh or less and is not the rate to budget a cooled house on.
- Your bill prints your tariff class. Use it rather than guessing from this page.
- Ask for twelve months of the property's power bills before signing anything.
- External shade beats internal curtains, and a ventilated, shaded or light-colored roof beats both.
- No neighborhood ranking appears here, on cooling or on anything else.
- Measure the cost of your own unit over one billing cycle rather than trusting any estimate, including one you might see elsewhere on this subject.
Where to check
The tariff, the classes and the standing charges are from Guyana Power and Light's published rates and tariffs, held in our own reference data with the in-force date above, and the statement that no Commission order since 2021 changed a tariff rests on the Public Utilities Commission's own published orders on GPL. Climate normals would come from the Hydrometeorological Service of Guyana, which is where to ask, since this article quotes none. Everything here was read on 24 October 2026.
AI-Generated Content: This article was created with AI assistance and may contain inaccuracies. Please verify important information with official sources.
