It won’t be long before the Indiana nights start getting cold and your furnace kicks on for the first time since spring You’ve likely tried to repress the memory of last winter’s high heating bills, but you can use those bad memories to motivate yourself to take steps this heating season to lower the bills and save money. Follow some of these tips to save energy and your hard-earned dollars:
- Install a programmable thermostat to allow you to schedule your heating so it matches the times when you’re using the house. You can program it to reduce the temperatures by 10-15 degrees when you’re at work and 5-10 degrees while you’re sleeping. Then you can program it to return to a comfortable temperature shortly before you arrive home or awaken.
- Reverse the direction of your ceiling fan blades so they’re moving clockwise (the switch is usually on the fan housing). This will blow air upward, where it will force warm air that’s collected in the upper part of the room downward into your living spaces. This supplemental warming will allow you to reduce the temperature on your thermostat a few degrees, saving money on energy.
- Schedule a pre-season maintenance check to ensure your heating system is ready to take on the long months of hard work. The technician will make sure your ducts aren’t leaking, and seal them if they are, and check your HVAC filter to make sure it’s not clogged. He will tell you the best filter for your system. He will inspect and maintain your system from top to bottom, and minimize the likelihood that you’ll need to call someone in for expensive repairs in mid-January.
- Instead of cranking the heat all the way up and lounging around in shorts and shirts, wear long pants and sweaters and keep the home’s temperature at a reasonable level.
- If you are only using a small space in your home, use a safely operating space heater to warm up that area instead of heating the entire house. This will allow you to keep your thermostat down while still keeping you warm where you are.
Contact Mowery Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing for quality home heating and cooling services in the greater Indianapolis area.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Brownsburg, Indiana and surrounding areas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).
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