The Twin Cities are getting colder every day, as winter settles in. This is the time to give some serious thought to your heating system. How can you keep you and your loved ones warm this winter without spending a fortune?
Here are some helpful tips to help you hold down your home-heating costs:
- Turn down your thermostat. How much you turn it down is up to you, but you can find your threshold by turning it down a degree every day until someone notices — then inch it back up a couple degrees. You also can set your thermostat lower at night and on days when nobody’s home. After all, there’s no need to keep the house toasty if there’s no one around to enjoy it.
- Use your windows to help ease the heating burden. Open the blinds on sunny days to let the sun heat your home. Then shut the shades at night to seal in heat.
- Keep your fireplace damper closed, if you have one, when it isn’t being used.
- Use the exhaust fans in your kitchen and bathroom sparingly. Exhaust fans blow out hot air, letting in colder air that has to be heated.
- Change your furnace filters regularly to keep your system running efficiently. Dirty filters make your furnace work unnecessarily hard to blow air through clogs in them, which translates to higher heating bills. Check them monthly, and change them as often, or at least every two months while you’re HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) system is working around the clock.
- Don’t forget about your water heater. You can reduce your home-heating costs significantly by turning the thermostat on your water down from 140 to 120 degrees.
- Shut the door to any rooms that you don’t use, and close the heating vents in those rooms. Be careful about closing too many vents, though — if more than 60 percent of them are closed, your furnace may overheat.
Contact Marsh Heating & Air Conditioningfor more advice on heating your house on a budget this winter. We’ve been handling the Twin Cities’ heating and cooling needs since 1974, and our professional technicians will do all they can to help you reduce your home-heating costs.
Our goal is to help educate our customers about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about heating costs and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
Marsh Heating and Air Conditioning services Minnesota’s Twin Cities. Visit our websiteto see our special offers and get started today!
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