Heating Your Home Efficiently

These are tips on maintaing the heat in your home and how to effectively and efficiently heat your home.

• Hang curtains or blinds in your windows. Just a simple piece of fabric creates a heat barrier between the window and your home and can save you hundreds of dollars per year.
• When cooking with an oven during the winter, leave the oven door open when you’re done. Let all that heat spread throughout the house.
• Get your heating ducts cleaned. Dirty ducts not only reduce your furnaces efficiency, but also add greatly to airborne pollution inside your home.
• Close heating vents in rooms you’re not using, like guest bedrooms or in a kids room that has moved out. Why heat empty space? If the door is always shut than the cold room stays cold and will not effect the rest of the house.
• Check the flame on your furnace. If it is getting enough oxygen, then it should be a bright blue healthy looking flame. If it is sputtering or looks kinda feeble, than you may need to get more oxygen to your furnace. This may sound counterintuitive, but it may be necessary to cut a whole in your basement or near the furnace intake leading outside, and run HVAC pipe in toward the furnace. If this is needed, call an HVAC professional or a handyman.
• Lower the temperature on your water heater. Optimal temperature is 120 degrees. If it is higher than that you will waste a lot of energy keeping in warm. It can also stress and speed up the corrosive process on your pipes.
• Keep the heat on a regular temperature. It costs far more money to heat up a cold room, than to just maintain heat in it. If you are going out of town, obviously you want to shut your heat off (unless you have pets, then that’s just cruel), but if the house is only going to be empty for the day or a couple days, leave it on. You may want to turn it down during the day, but don’t vary the heat by more than 3-5 degrees. What you think may be helping could really be costing you more money, and cold toes when you get home from work.