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Air conditioning (AC) is a key driver to produce electricity consumption, particularly in residential buildings. In Indonesia, the electricity bill during pandemic covid-19 has increased to a high level on hot days. This is because during these periods many consumers applied their AC for a long time at the same time. It is therefore essential to develop an innovative model to control the electricity peak price and keep a comfortable room during hot days. Many previous studies have confirmed that applied evaporative cooling or other technologies can minimize the whole consumption and cost. This research aims to design a pre-cooling model (PM) for AC to avoid high electricity prices at midday during hot days. To achieve this goal a mathematical model was developed to define the energy cost (EC) and total cost (TC) for AC during the hot season. Under numerical optimization, the EC can be minimized when a spike may occur due to increased temperature at midday for a half hour (0.5 h) and one hour (1 h) spike cases. To justify this model, a PM was applied for two different building characteristics. As a result, the benefits of a PM if a spike occurs for 0.5 h and 1 h were achieved, such as IDR 10,061 (30.43 %) and IDR 10,693 (24.44 %) for building-1; IDR 12,071 (37.40 %) and IDR 14,844 (34.97 %) for building-2. In addition, the TC considering the probability of a spike of 0.5 h and 1 h if the spike occurs every five minutes were IDR 45,247 and IDR 38,287 for building-1 and building-2, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]