Save Money and Energy With A Few Easy Tips
It’s no secret that heating your home when it’s cold outside can cost a fortune if you aren’t careful. However, if you’re tired of watching your home energy bills rise once coolers temperatures hit, you don’t have to sit back and let it happen. Instead, you can save yourself some serious money while also reducing the amount of energy your home consumes during the fall and winter by taking a few simple steps.
Cover Up Drafty Windows
Have you ever walked by a window and suddenly felt a cold pocket of air graze your skin? To prevent this from happening, tape clear, plastic film to the inside of your windows during the winter months. When you do this, make sure that the plastic is adhered tightly to the frame of the window to reduce infiltration. Additionally, you should consider putting up insulating drapes on the windows that still feel drafty even after you get done winterizing them.
Lower What You Pay for Warm Water
If you broke down each component of your energy bills, you’d probably be surprised as to how much water heating adds to this total. In the majority of homes, obtaining hot water can account from anywhere from 14 to 25 percent of their total energy consumption. To reduce what you pay for warm water, lower the temperature on your water heater to the warm setting. While this will help you save money, it will also help you avoid scalding your hands.
Pay Attention to the Temperature
Like many other people, keeping your home nice and warm during the fall and winter is important to you. However, this doesn’t mean that you have to pay a fortune to make it happen. When you’re at home, keep your home at a temperature that is comfortable, but not overly warm or cool. When you go to bed at night or before you leave your home for the day, set back your thermostat by 10 to 15 degrees.
Maintain Your Heating System
If your heating system isn’t working efficiently, you could be paying extra to heat your home and not even know it. Even before the leaves start to turn colors, call your HVAC technician over and have him or her take a look at your system. While he or she is there, ask him or her about what you can do to maintain your heating system throughout the winter and how to prevent your system from suddenly breaking down in the middle of an extremely chilly night.
Use the Power of the Sun
The best part about the energy that comes from the sun is that it’s 100 percent free. Use this to your advantage by letting the sunlight in to warm your home during the day and closing your drapes and blinds completely when it starts to get dark outside to prevent draftiness.
Keep in mind that these are just a few of the ways you can reduce energy consumption and what you pay for heating during the fall and winter months. If there are any other energy-saving strategies you like to use, make sure that you add them to your overall plan when the temperatures outside start to drop.
Living in New England, we have to find all ways possible to save money and energy on these bills. Do you have other tips that you’d care to share?
As you can imagine, there are many times when one of our cats will get shut into a room. They hate being confined and start clawing at the floor, the casing, the door – all in attempts to get out of the room. Then of course, there are the times when they want to get into rooms – especially when I’m in one with the door shut. They do the same thing until I get up to let their furs in. With our flooring as it is now, I don’t have to worry about any destruction being done to the floor.
