Lowering Your Heating Bill

Utility bill become a painful experience? Winter time doesn't have to be uncomfortable just so your budget can survive. Here are some things you can do to keep comfortable and lower costs.

Clean and Maintain your Furnace.

To keep your utility costs down, make sure you keep your furnace, heat pump, vents, and air filters clean. Especially keep air flow around vents clear, and don't allow things to be piled up on your boiler system or the radiant surfaces of those systems. This makes these systems work harder and increase their consumption of energy. Lack of routine maintenance will also cause heating systems to suffer lower performance and increase energy consumption.

Programmable or Smart Thermostats

Using a programmable thermostat allows set back of temperature when you are away from home or are sleeping. While guarding against freeze up that can result from shutting the heat off. Just a few degrees of setback in temperature can make a substantial difference in your heating bills. As well as adding to piece of mind that things won't get too cold. Smart thermostats have the added benefit of notifying you if things are getting too cold in your home when you are away. As well as they can be set up to Geocache, so if you don't have a regular schedule, they merely sense when you arrive and leave and act accordingly to provide you with the best comfort, while helping to lower your heating costs when your home is unoccupied.

Sun, heat gain.

Allow the sun in...simple enough, if we open up our shades during the day we can take advantage of natural solar thermal gain from the windows that face that direction in our home. This is a natural way to absorb heat gain and save on our utility bill.

Insulation and Sealing

Make sure your home is sealed properly, and has the right amount of insulation to keep the cold outside where it belongs.

Sometimes this is simple, adding gasket seals around doors and windows. Or looking to see if insulation has fallen down under the flooring or moved out of place in the attic. You may need to talk with a professional to get your insulation and windows better sealed and closed in.

Either way, investments made here affect your heating bills and will also help you in summertime to keep your home as comfortable and efficient as possible.

Humidifiers

Adding humidity to your home can really help. Heating systems tend to dry out the air in your home. Many times the winter weather adds to the lack of humidity. When we add humidity back in to the home, we feel warmer at lower temperatures, thus allowing our heating system to run less and lowering our utility bills. Also we gain added health benefits of having the proper amount of humidity in our home and thus improving the overall comfort of our living space.

Conclusion

Air Care Systems can help you to keep your system running efficiently, we can help you identify if some of the listed solutions above can help your home. Call us for an inspection if you are concerned your system isn't performing correctly or if you are seeing spikes in your utility bills. Lowering your costs is something we are happy to help you with.