Category: Heating

Every winter in Greensburg, PA the temperatures drop, and the ground is covered with snow and ice as residents settle into their cold weather lifestyles. Whether it’s a blanket of fresh snow, an icy walkway or icicles hanging from the edge of your roof, winter is truly a sight to behold.

Of course, you’ll also need to navigate your home heating system to find a nice balance between being comfortable and keeping your monthly heating bills under control.

Tips For Setting Your Thermostat

It’s never a good idea to just set one temperature and leave it 24 hours a day during the winter, especially with today’s smarter programmable thermostats.

Many HVAC experts claim that you should aim for around 68F during the day and then lower it to 66F at night when everyone is asleep. If there are people at home regularly during the day, then you may want to bump it to 70F or even 72F to keep everyone comfortable.

To help ease your family members into lower indoor temperatures, the US Department of Energy says you should try setting the temperature you prefer, and if it’s higher than the recommended temperature, lower it one degree each day. This way, you will soon get to the ideal temperature but won’t notice the subtle differences as is it lowered each day.

Thermostats Then & Now

If you still have a mechanical, non-programmable thermostat in your home, you are one of a dying breed.

These used to be the norm in every home, but the fact they are no longer convenient and potentially dangerous due to mercury means they are being phased out. After these, there were digital non-programmable thermostats that were still inconvenient but with a nicer display.

Then, we got into programmable thermostats, and things have never quite been the same. Now, you can set specific temperatures for certain times of the day, for a week or even more in advance.

Today, learning thermostats can adapt to your family’s preferences, and communication thermostats can offer troubleshooting tips and maintenance advice if things aren’t working right.

How You Can Influence Your Electric Bill

There are some tips you can follow on a consistent basis that will enable you to keep your thermostat set lower and save on your electric bill.

Typically, your bill will go up in winter as you have your heating system kicked into high gear to stay warm. Add on the fact that everyone else is also doing the same, so the price of electricity will rise, and you can see why your bills will be higher.

If you are among the homeowners that like to save money when possible, then little actions like closing drapes at night, using a ceiling fan to help distribute heat, keeping your furnace well maintained, letting the sunshine in, or even wearing extra clothing can enable you to set the thermostat lower.

Feel free to share any tips you may have in the comments, and if you want to learn more or are interested in one of our reliable HVAC service, give us a call at (724) 382-4844 today.

If you take some very basic measures to insulate your home before the start of the cooler seasons, you will never find yourself in a freezing house cranking up the heating system unnecessarily.

You will always be quite warm thanks to the fact that your dwelling is so well insulated that it loses a minimum amount of warmth in the first place. There are also some things you can do that can help keep the warm air circulating through your place.

5 Hacks For Keeping Heat In Your Home

1. Insulate your windows by caulking all of your window frames. You can buy caulking meant for this purpose at a hardware store.

Most windows can be insulated using water-based insulation from a tube, but if the window is a large dining room window or an enormous floor-to-ceiling pair of sliding doors, then you might want to apply the caulking with a caulking gun.

2. Use a can of spray insulation to seal areas of your home that might have little nooks and crannies that leak air to the outside. Areas that usually need treatment are the attic, wet-rooms, porches, and basements. Treating the door that leads to your garage with foam insulation can also help your home hold heat.

3. Run a humidifier for an hour or two a day to keep the air moist, because moist air holds heat for longer.

If you do not want to risk running up your bill by running a dehumidifier, you can also use plants to keep the air humid and moist.

Keep a lot of plants, especially big tropical plants with a broad leafy surface in your place to both purify and humidify the air.

4. Whenever you are finished using the oven, leave the door open and don’t turn on the overhead exhaust. The heat left over from baking will then escape from the oven and further warm up the room.

5. Turn your ceiling fan on low and run it in a counterclockwise direction. This encourages warm air that has naturally risen to your ceiling to drift back downwards towards the floor. As your air is always warm, this prevents you from having to turn up the thermostat too much during a cold snap.

Another bonus to having a well-insulated home is that it keeps the heat out when you turn on your air-conditioning in the summer. Of course, you can augment this effect by having your ceiling fan run in reverse counter-clockwise on fast speed to bring the chilled air produced by the air conditioning downwards.

This is a bonus for Greensburg, PA residents who have been experiencing sizzling hot weather the past few summers due to extreme climate change and who do not want to pay incredibly high electricity bills for running their air conditioning.

If you do not feel that you are the best inspector for your HVAC system, then hire a licensed professional to look for cracks, leaks, fuel problems and other common problems. This will prevent you from having to deal with a major emergency, such as a broken furnace or clogged air duct in the middle of the winter.