Heating and Air Conditioning Tips

These tips are meant as a helpful resource.  Corley Plumbing, Air & Electric strongly suggests consulting a licensed contractor and referencing manufacturer's instructions.

Heating and cooling your home uses more energy and drains more energy dollars than any other system in your home. Almost half of your utility bill goes for heating and cooling. No matter what kind of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system you have in your house, you can save money and increase your comfort by properly maintaining and upgrading your equipment. These tips are useful in making sure you don’t overlook any cost saving opportunities.

Change your air filters every month. A dirty filter will make the system work harder and will shorten the life of your system. A dirty filter will also produce lower indoor air quality.

Not feeling the breeze of cool air? Clean air registers, baseboard heaters, and vents as needed. Make sure they are not blocked by furniture, carpeting, or drapes and limiting the air flow in the room.

Curtains are more than decoration. During the winter, keep the draperies and shades on your south-facing windows open during the day to allow the sunlight to enter your home and closed at night to reduce the chill you may feel from cold windows. In the summer, drawn shades will keep the heat of the sun away and help lower temperatures.

Turn it off...or at least up. It is more inefficient and expensive to leave the A/C on all day than it is to turn it off or at least raise the thermostat. You will also make your air conditioner compressor work constantly and this is the biggest user of energy. By installing a programmable thermostat, you can have the air set to turn on thirty minutes to an hour before your return home and thus return to a comfortable temperature.

Use ceiling fans. They will make you feel cooler and use less air conditioning. For every degree that you raise your thermostat by, you will save 3% on your cooling costs. However, leaving your ceiling fan on when you're not in the room is a waste of energy and money because fans cool people and do not lower the temperature of the room.

Insulation to increase energy savings. Add insulation to increase your energy savings. Do not overlook important areas in your home where energy can be saved, including the ductwork of the heating and air conditioning system. Check the label on the insulation that you are purchasing. You want to make sure you are getting that which is best suited for your needs and application. A good insulation label will include a clearly stated R-value, which will tell you the resistance to heat flow. The higher the value is, the greater the effectiveness. This label will also include information about health and safety issues.

Don't just trap the heat. Adding an attic ventilator to remove heat can dramatically decrease the temperature in an attic and be more than just adding additional insulation. By removing the heat, you will increase the energy efficiency of your home.

Just where is all that dryer lint going? Make sure your clothes dryer is vented to the outside, but away from the condensing unit or heat pump. Outdoor coils that are impacted with lint or dirt can result in a large increase in your utility bills.

I may be high maintenance, but I'm worth it. A new heating and cooling system is not an inexpensive purchase so you want to make sure you protect your investment. A simple way to do that is by having a maintenance check performed on your system annually.  Just as your car needs a tune-up to run efficiently and reliably, your HVAC system requires the same maintenance.  The unit needs to be cleaned, filters need to be changed, proper refrigerant charge must be maintained, and the system needs to be inspected.

Remember the tortoise and the hare? You won’t be able to cool a house any faster by setting the thermostat lower than the temperature you want to achieve. If you want to cool your home from 78° to 72° setting the thermostat to 60° isn’t going to make the unit cool faster. It will still take the same amount of time to go from the higher temperature to the lower one only you will probably end up wasting more energy if you forget to adjust the thermostat once your desired temperature has been reached. The exception to this is for single room units that do have a high, medium and low setting. In this instance, a higher setting will cool a room faster.