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30 Jul, 2020
Energy costs make up a significant portion of your monthly bills. With changes to your daily home energy-use routine, you can expect to save hundreds of dollars every year.
Energy efficiency means you’re consuming less energy to do the same jobs, decreasing your home's energy waste, and saving money. But increasing your energy efficiency involves more than just using less energy.
You have to become aware of how energy is used, where it's wasted, and how it can be used more effectively and efficiently in day-to-day life.
To help you save energy, as well as money on your bills, we’ve gathered 9 insights to help cut back on your energy consumption. These tips range from free and simple tricks to bigger investments that’ll help you increase your savings in the long run.
How can you save energy at home? Get started with our top tips below:
1. Put Your Heater On A Timer
If you have a boiler system that heats up water in advance, there’s perhaps a large part of the day when you don’t need to use it. Put your hot water heater on a timer and set it to come on before you get up or get home. Give it around 20 minutes to heat up if it’s a newer boiler, or 40 minutes if it’s older, then you’re good to go. This will help you save more energy.
2. Turn Down Your General Thermostat Settings
One of the best ways to conserve energy is to simply reset your thermostat when you are asleep or away from home. You can do this automatically without sacrificing comfort by installing an automatic setback or programmable thermostat. And just remember: you can save as much as 10% a year on heating and cooling by simply turning your thermostat back 7°-10°F for 8 hours a day, from its normal setting.
3. Wash Only Full Loads Of Dishes And Clothes
Your clothes washer and dishwasher are designed to run at their best with full loads. Moreover, if you run them only when full, you run them less often, which is a great way to conserve energy.
4. Use Cold Water To Wash Your Clothes
Roughly 75% of the energy required to do a load of laundry goes into heating the water. That said, clothes washers and laundry detergents are designed to work efficiently with cold water - so use it. This is a great method for saving energy because it puts less pressure on electricity grids. If you only use hot water when you need to disinfect, you could save $60 or more a year.
5. Keep The Oven Door Closed While Cooking
When using the oven, it's tempting to frequently open the door to check on your dish's progress. But, because the hot air contained in the oven is an important part of the appliance's cooking process, frequent peeking is self-defeating. Every time the oven door is opened, the temperature inside is reduced by as much as 25 degrees, forcing it to work even harder (and use more energy) to get back to the proper cooking temperature. If you need to check on a dish, use the oven window instead.
6. Don’t Keep The Refrigerator Door Open For Long
The longer the fridge door is open, the harder the appliance has to work to maintain a cool temperature. Decide what you want in advance to minimize the amount of time the fridge or freezer door is open.
7. Switch Out Incandescent Lights
In an incandescent bulb, electricity passes through a filament that gets so hot that it produces light. But 95% of this energy is wasted as heat, with only 5% going toward light. Switch them out or use them sparingly. Leaving them on for long periods is highly wasteful.
8. Replace Incandescent Lights With LED Bulbs
When it comes to strategies that bolster your conservation of electricity, LED bulbs are much more energy-efficient than incandescent bulbs. They are hands down the best light bulb to use with your home. According to Energy.gov, widespread use of LEDs could save about 348 TWh of electricity by 2027. That’s the annual electrical output of 441,000 MW electric power plants and represents a savings of more than $30 billion at today’s electricity prices.
9. Use A High-Efficiency Furnace
One of the common pains for homeowners, especially during the winter, is that older furnaces need a pilot light, which is always lit and burning fuel. With a high-efficiency furnace, you can get rid of this problem by using specially-designed burners that only activate when you choose. This leads to less fuel waste when you’re away from the home and a decrease in your overall heating bills.
At Valley Service, we are proud to offer new high-efficiency furnaces that melt the winter blues away while also saving electricity. Our team is always looking for new ways to bring you lower energy bills and greater peace of mind. Give us a call today at (701) 293-5701 or use our contact form to learn more about our Fargo HVAC services.