Everyone makes mistakes sometimes. Everyone locks their keys in their car or forgets their wallet at home. Everyone curses after getting home from the grocery store and realizing that he or she neglected to buy the most important ingredient for tonight’s dinner. It’s also common to make mistakes while heating your home.
Some errors are more costly than others. Mistakes made in heating your home may be relatively simple to fix, but in the meantime, they will cost you both money and comfort. Here are the four most common heating mistakes made by homeowners in Baltimore, Maryland.
Neglecting Maintenance
Some mistakes have a more significant impact than others. Forgetting preventive HVAC maintenance, for example, is a mistake that has a significant impact on the efficiency and power of your HVAC system. Preventive maintenance should regularly be conducted in the spring and fall because it prepares the system for the strain it may experience in the upcoming season.
If you forgot to have maintenance conducted during the fall, it’s not too late. With a professional touch, your heater can warm up your home more effectively. Thanks to the improved efficiency and reliability it creates, maintenance can also offset the negative effects of other heating mistakes.
Cranking the Thermostat
Yes, your heater can turn your home into a balmy sauna, but that doesn’t mean you should let it. No matter how powerful your heater is, forcing it to run at its greatest capacity will reduce the efficiency and the lifespan of the system. The choice is yours: be extremely warm today, or be comfortably warm for the next eight years.
This doesn’t mean that you need to shiver yourself to sleep, but you shouldn’t constantly keep your thermostat at 85 degrees. In fact, every degree over 72 degrees can raise your utility bills between one and three percent. Over an entire season, that adds up to hundreds of dollars that could go towards other areas in your budget. If 70 degrees isn’t enough, use other means to stay warm such as throwing on a sweater or guzzling a warm drink.
Keeping Curtains Closed
What? Shouldn’t you keep the curtains closed to keep out the cold? During the night, yes, you should. However, that extra sunlight can warm up your home during the day. Plus, everyone needs some fresh, bright sunlight to brighten their mood. This extra warmth can help you to avoid cranking up the thermostat.
If you use your curtains to limit the effect of drafts, it will be more effective to seal the drafts than to cover them. Lay fresh caulk around the edges of the window to seal any cracks that may have formed; even with a curtain, you’re still losing efficiency to that draft. The only thing that should be coming through that window is welcome sunlight.
Leaving Heater Running
No one wants to come home from a long day at work to a home that’s just as cold on the inside as it is on the outside. To prevent this, many homeowners leave their heater running at full power throughout the day, even when the family has gone to work and school. This needlessly wastes energy and money and strains the system, making it more likely for issues to arise in the future.
But don’t just turn off your heater when you leave for work. Instead, install a programmable thermostat. A programmable thermostat allows you to program the exact times you want your home heated to a comfortable temperature. You can program the thermostat to let the temperature fall — just low enough so your home isn’t freezing — while you’re at work. Then, you can program it to raise the temperature when you’re on your way home. A programmable thermostat not only fixes this common heating mistake, it also increases the efficiency of your system.
There’s no need to be embarrassed if you’ve fallen victim to any of these common heating mistakes. You can make sure that they never happen again. To prevent further mistakes with professional maintenance, call Griffith Energy Services at 888-474-3391.
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