When you are a home owner here in the United States, you have a lot of responsibilities just through the nature of home ownership. From making inspecting your plumbing to caring for your heating and cooling system to replacing your windows and servicing your roof at least twice a year, there are many things that must be considered. It’s not unlikely that you’ll feel a little bit overwhelmed at first, but taking care of your home will prove to be well worth it in the end.
Heating and cooling services, for instance, are incredibly crucial to the average home. In fact, a home without heating can be a dangerous home indeed, particularly in the parts of the country where the winters are long, freezing, and brutal. In such places, heating is essential for safety and those who live in places where there is not heating put themselves in considerable danger.
Cooling is also important and has become so popular that now more than one third of all homes have air conditioning systems of some sort. While air conditioning is not nearly as essential as heating in terms of safety, it can certainly help the long summers pass by a lot more comfortably, something that the average person will be highly in favor of. From the air conditioning unit to central air conditioning, the incorporation of an air conditioning system into a home is often one that is incredibly welcome.
But HVAC systems can be incredibly expensive to run here in the United States, even when they have had the proper care and servicing. In fact, heating and cooling make up very nearly fifty five percent of the average utility bills over the course of a year in the typical home, a sum of money that is far from insignificant. With heating and cooling services so essential here in the vast majority of the United States, how can we reduce the costs to make such services more attainable for many people throughout the country?
One way to do this is through the use of insulation. Insulation, in fact, can even be considered the key to lowering heating and cooling costs. If your insulation is not of the highest quality or is of a low quality, it is more likely than not that your insulation is actually losing you money. Switching to new insulation such as spray foam insulation has been found to have a tremendous impact on your energy bills.
In fact, heating and cooling costs can be reduced by as much as forty percent. On the contrary, an attic that is poorly insulated is likely to increase your overall energy bill by as much as five percent, a decent sum of money if you work out the math. Aside from insulation, there are a number of other ways to reduce your overall energy costs.
One of these ways is simply maintaining the regular servicing of your HVAC systems, be it for your heating system or your cooling system. Because the build up of particles and dirt can cause your HVAC system to work harder than it should need to, postponing maintenance and servicing can up the amount of energy that is expended as well as increasing your overall costs. Of course, regular servicing can also provide an HVAC repairs that are needed, stopping a problem and fixing it thoroughly before it spirals out of your control.
If your energy bills are still high after having regular servicing and installing new insulation, you might want to consider changing out your windows. Windows can become incredibly drafty over the course of time, especially if they are single pane windows and not double pane windows or the like. Heat loss through windows is actually responsible for up to thirty percent of your typical energy bill, not something that should ever be overlooked. Replacing your windows can therefore lead to a great deal of energy savings within your home.
From insulation to maintenance and servicing to switching out your windows, there are a number of ways you can keep your overall energy costs as low as is possible and these methods are obtainable by nearly everyone.
