Quick Tips for Saving Energy in your Home
• Regularly cleaning or replacing your filter will help your furnace run at full efficiency and supply better air flow.
• Keep the heat in by caulking, sealing and weather-stripping around your doors and windows to prevent heat from escaping to the outside. This makes your home more energy efficient and can create a savings on your energy bill.
• Close fireplace dampers when they are not in use. Having your fireplace cleaned and checked out by a professional every year keeps it operating safely and efficiently.
Doors and fireplaces account for 11% and 14% of your home’s heat loss respectively.
• Reduce energy costs and increase comfort with a programmable thermostat. A programmable thermostat can maximize your energy savings without the hassle of manually adjusting your thermostat. Large energy savings are possible when thermostat settings are set back during the sleep hours and times when no one is home.
• Set the thermostat at an energy efficient setting (between 68 and 72 degrees F or lower). Remember that for each degree the thermostat setting can is lowered, you could see a 3% energy savings on the heating portion of your bill.
• Reverse the direction of your ceiling fan. By changing the direction to clockwise in the winter, the fan will push rising warm air back into the room.
Only 20% of homes built before 1980 were well insulated.
• Consider adding insulation in your attic. You can increase the comfort of your home while reducing your heating and cooling needs by up to 30% by investing just a few hundred dollars in proper insulation and weatherization products.
• Open your draperies and let the sun in. The sun's rays will warm your home. Conversely, after dark close your draperies to hold heat inside your home.
• Close doors and/or heating vents to unused rooms.
• Be sure heating registers and vents are not blocked by draperies or furniture. These vents should also be cleaned regularly with a broom or vacuum.
• If your home has single-pane windows, as almost half of U.S. homes do, consider replacing them. New double-pane windows with high-performance glass can reduce heat loss. Storm windows can reduce your heat loss through windows by 25% to 50%.
Windows can account for 10% to 15% of your heating bill.
• Repair leaky hot water faucets immediately. A hot water faucet leaking one drop per second wastes 160 gallons per month - or 16 hot baths!
What are you doing to save energy in your home?
4 comments:
Our home is an energy mess at the moment. It is from 1927 and has had little done to help with energy conservation.
Thanks for all the great information. I had no idea that doors and fireplaces made you lose heat--I always thought that windows were the big culprit, and hadn't thought about the others. We recently got a new door without windows in it like our previous one, so hopefully that counts for saving energy. Great post!
We have a house built in 1939 and it was not designed with energy efficiency in mind. That being said, we have begun to make it better. We have 4 doors. We've replaced 2 already and that made a huge difference. We also have a bunch of windows and that has helped. The other neat thing was we had to replace our furnace...that part stunk but we found we had too big a furnace before...so it would blast a bunch of heat really quick then cut off. The furnace guy said it was better to have a smaller (correctly sized) furnace which would heat slower but would allow the heat to better circulate. It is cheaper/more efficient to operate and the heat does get everywhere. No more cold corners, etc. Anyhow, we can definitely feel a difference and our energy bills have gone down. Thanks for the post with good ideas!
What I meant to say about windows is that we've begun to replace them, esp in the bedrooms and they are much more comfortable now. I didn't realize it (until I replaced one because I couldn't afford to hire someone at the time), but windows are really easy to replace yourself. If you are the least bit handy, you can do it. Just pull the inside trim off and look at all that holds them in place and you'll see. Anyhow, it effectively cuts the cost in half installing the windows myself and it makes a huge comfort difference!
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