Home Heating Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them

The home heating season, no matter how aware you are of its impending arrival, still has a way of sneaking up on you.  One day, you’re running the AC and loving every minute of it. The next morning, you wake up feeling your home is a meat locker. Off with the AC, open the windows and, before you know it, the thermostat switch will flip to “Heat.”

Well, before that happens, here’s a little refresher course on how to keep your home nice and toasty while

improving energy efficiency and, in the process, shaving some dollars off your heating bills.

  • Don’t heat an empty house. If you’re still relying on that old thermostat, it’s time to make the switch to a programmable model. A programmable thermostat allows you to preset temps around your family’s schedule, so you’re not heating an empty home or coming home to frigid temps until the thermostat gets things back to normal. Even better than a standard programmable thermostat is one with remote Wi-Fi access that enables you to check temps and make changes on the fly.
  • Don’t turn the thermostat too low. While you don’t want to heat an empty house, setting the thermostat too low while you’re away forces your furnace to work much harder than normal to turn your house back into a warm and comfortable environment.
  • Set thermostat to your desired temp. Let’s say you come home to a house that’s a bit colder than you’d like. So, you head for the thermostat and spike the heat, hoping that by doing so, things will warm up faster. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. It just makes your furnace run longer, use more energy, and results in higher heating costs.
  • Lock, don’t just close, the windows. Not only is locking the windows a good safety measure, doing so forms a tighter seal than simply closing them. That, in turn, keeps warm air in and cold air out.
  • Leave vents open, even in unused rooms. Assuming your heating system is properly sized for your home, it should evenly distribute warm air from room to room. Closing off certain vents that help form your warm-air system disrupts heat distribution which, again, causes the furnace to work harder and less efficiently.
  • Don’t leave exhaust fans running longer than necessary. Kitchen and bath fans do a great job of removing moisture from the air. Yet leaving them on for too long removes warm air right along with it.
  • Seal air leaks. A gap around an exterior door, a mall crack in a windowpane, or broken weather stripping might not seem like a big deal. Yet these are among the biggest causes of heat loss. Look around and seal or caulk windows and doors letting cold air in and warm air out.

Here in Westchester, Putnam, Fairfield, and adjacent counties, our heating systems take a beating from October at least through the end of April.  That’s a long time to go without a rest, even if you are a machine. So, to help it perform at its best, contact Air Professionals today to request our tune-up and inspection service. Just like that, your system will be back in peak condition helping to save you even more money without having to sacrifice indoor comfort.

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