If you have some sort of air conditioning in your home, you’re one of the lucky ones—or at least it feels that way until the energy bill rolls in. If you’re sweating over sky-high energy bills, there’s a strategy you can try that may seem counterintuitive at first, but it could keep your home cool and your bills manageable during the hottest summer days: supercooling.

Supercooling or pre-cooling is a strategy designed to keep your home at a comfortable temperature while reducing your energy consumption. There is evidence that it actually works if you take the time to plan it properly.

If you’re like most people and set your HVAC system to run primarily during the warmest hours of the day and then turn it down during the cooler hours of the night, you may be doing what scientists call Doing It Wrong. That’s because when an HVAC system kicks in in a home that’s already quite warm, it has to work extra hard (and use a lot of expensive energy) to pump the heat out. Supercooling, or pre-cooling, turns the strategy on its head.

The idea is to run your HVAC system on high at night, when it's coolest outside and the sun isn't heating your home. Try to get the temperature in your home really low — around 60 degrees, if you can manage it. When the sun comes out and the outside temperatures rise, your house will be nice and cold — and it will stay that way for a long time, so you can turn your HVAC system to low. During the day, set your thermostat to the highest setting you find comfortable — say, 74 degrees. It will take a long time for your house to warm up to that point if you take a few steps (covered below), and your HVAC may not work at all.