Thanks very much russ, I appreciate your input. I didn't know that about air conditioners, but that makes a lot of sense to me as there are many other things that work in a similar fashion.
I can't seem to find a straight answer so I thought asking here might come up with a credible response.
Everyone I know tells me that it wastes more electricity to turn off your air conditioner because of the amount of energy it takes to cool the house those extra degrees when you turn it on...
1cm^2 = .0001m^2 so 2.28x10^-4/1.49x10^-4 gives a velocity of 1.53m/s
I just plugged it into toricelli's equation (v1=sqrt(2g(h2-h1)) and solved for h2 (h1 is 0), which gave the answer .119m = 11.9cm.