Air conditioning tips won’t help you when it’s heating problems that are plaguing your home and your wallet. Many homeowners are making serious heating mistakes that are costing them thousands of dollars a year. So how many of these mistakes are you making? Chances are you’ve committed at least one of these and could be committing even more without even realizing it.
Fooling Your Thermostat
Your thermostat is a critical tool for ensuring that your home is comfortable. The unit reads the air temperature and then decides to trigger your HVAC system in order to maintain the temperature that you have set. But when you place home appliances in the vicinity of the thermostat, the heat that emanates from those appliances can fool the thermostat and trigger a false reading. That can keep the system from working when you need it or keep it running longer than necessary.
Failing to Upgrade Your Thermostat
Since your thermostat is such an important component of your heating system it’s critical that you have a unit that is up with the times. That means you may need to switch out your old unit for a programmable model, one that has the features for helping you adjust the thermostat when you’re not home.
If you are allowing your heating system to continuously run while you aren’t home, you’re just wasting money heating an empty house. A programmable thermostat can turn the heat on before you come home and turn it off right after you leave.
Turning Your Thermostat All the Way Up
One of the biggest misconceptions about thermostats is that cranking it up to 80 degrees when you’re feeling cold will heat the home a lot faster. Nothing could be further from the truth. Just because you’ve set it that high doesn’t mean your home will get warmer any quicker than if you set it to 72 degrees instead. All it really does it overwork your HVAC system causing it to break down sooner over time.
Crowding Your Air Vents
Placing furniture or rugs near or in front of an air vent is a bad idea. Your home’s heat comes through those vents and if they are obstructed for any reason, the heating system has to work that much harder to expel the air where you want it to go. An HVAC system that has to work overtime can get overtaxed easily and that may leave you running it longer to reach the temperature you want.
You could end up paying more in repair costs as well when the system breaks down prematurely due to all the stress you’ve put on it, all because your air vents have been obstructed.
Leaking Air Vents
Clogging your air vents is bad, allowing them to leak is almost worse. You’re allowing your costly climate-controlled warm air to escape to the outside and you are literally heating the neighborhood, while taking longer to get the inside of your home to the temperature level you want. You guessed it, you’ll be paying more in utility costs and possibly spending more in air conditioning services in charlottesville va to repair the system when it breaks down sooner than expected.