The holiday season is not that far away, and with it comes that Minnesota chill. Hopefully, you’ve already started preparing your home with a fall maintenance check on your heating system, but there are still plenty of ways you can warm up your home to enjoy the holiday season and save energy this winter.
- Start out the holiday season with a new furnace filter, and make sure you inspect it every month, changing or cleaning it when necessary. There’s no other step you can take that can have more benefits for energy efficiency and furnace performance than taking care of the filter.
- Instead of heating up the oven, try to cook more with your microwave, or cook up some extra holiday energy savings by using a slow cooker to prepare your meals.
- Remember, the more energy-efficient appliances you use, the more energy you can save.
- If you cook with glass or ceramic pans, you can usually reduce your oven temperature by 25 degrees and have it finish cooking just as quickly.
- Once you’ve fortified your house against the cold, fortify your fridge. A full refrigerator and freezer will use less energy.
- Resist opening the oven door to check on your dinner. Use timers and peek in the window as much as possible instead.
- If a holiday ham or stuffed turkey is on the list for your holiday meals, the slow-roasting makes preheating the oven unnecessary, so you can skip it to add to your holiday energy savings.
- Replace your old holiday lights with LED holiday lights; they last longer and use much less energy.
- You can get even more holiday energy savings by using timers on your lighting displays.
- Be more creative with your holiday decorations and try to think of things you can use to decorate that don’t need to be plugged in.
- Use fewer lights on your holiday tree and make the ones you have shine brighter with tinsel and mirrored ornaments for more holiday energy savings.
Would you like to learn more about the things you can do to make huge holiday energy savings this year? Please contact us at Marsh Heating & Air Conditioning. We’ve been serving the Twin Cities Metro Area since 1974.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about energy savings and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
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