Heating and Cooling Energy Saving Tips

Household Heating Systems

Although several different types of fuels are available to heat our homes, more than half of us use natural gas.
Heating and cooling your home uses more energy and drains more energy dollars than any other system in your home. Typically, 43% of your utility bill goes for heating and cooling. What's more, heating and cooling systems in the United States together emit 150 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, adding to global climate change. They also generate about 12% of the nation's sulfur dioxide and 4% of the nitrogen oxides, the chief ingredients in acid rain.
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. But remember, an energy-efficient furnace alone will not have as great an impact on your energy bills as using the whole-house approach. By combining proper equipment maintenance and upgrades with appropriate insulation, air sealing, and thermostat settings, you can cut your energy use for heating and cooling, and reduce environmental emissions, from 20% to 50%.

Heating and Cooling Tips

Set your thermostat as low as is comfortable in the winter and as high as is comfortable in the summer.
Clean or replace filters on furnaces once a month or as needed.
Clean warm-air registers, baseboard heaters, and radiators as needed; make sure they're not blocked by furniture, carpeting, or drapes.
Bleed trapped air from hot-water radiators once or twice a season; if in doubt about how to perform this task, call a professional.
Place heat-resistant radiator reflectors between exterior walls and the radiators.
Turn off kitchen, bath, and other exhaust fans within 20 minutes after you are done cooking or bathing; when replacing exhaust fans, consider installing high-efficiency, low-noise models.
During the heating season, 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.
During the cooling season, keep the window coverings closed during the day to prevent solar gain.

Long-Term Savings Tips

Select energy-efficient products when you buy new heating and cooling equipment. Your contractor should be able to give you energy fact sheets for different types, models, and designs to help you compare energy usage. For furnaces, look for high Annual Fuel Utilization Efficiency (AFUE) ratings. The national minimum is 78% AFUE, but there are ENERGY STAR models on the market that exceed 90% AFUE.
For air conditioners, look for a high Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio (SEER). The current minimum is 13 SEER for central air conditioners. ENERGY STAR models are 14 SEER or more.

$aving Money on HVAC-the WRONG way !!

When most homeowners think about reducing their heating costs, they look for "free" heat. Some of them find seemingly ingenious ways to seal sources of cold drafts. But in the process, they forget to think about oxygen, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, indoor air contaminants, what they are breathing and where it came from (or didn't come from), and the overall cause and effect of their action.

"Lets close the registers in unoccupied rooms"

This reduces air volume through the furnace, elevates heat exchanger temperatures, reduces heat transfer into the home, elevates vent temperatures and increases heat losses up the chimney, causes furnace short cycling and shortens component life. There are no savings here, only additional losses and costs. Better to add a zoning system, or use the lowest fan speed for continuous fan operation to keep the temperature more evenly distributed. This may allow for a one or two degree reduction in the thermostat setting. For older furnaces a relay may be needed to operate low speed on a "G" demand, but bring on high speed for a "Y" demand.

"Lets shut off some radiators"

Now we're looking at some possible broken pipes, boiler short cycling, more frequent hot surface igniter failures, and possible increased maintenance schedules. Again we can add some zoning fir more effective temperature control.An old trick with cast iron radiation and large water content boilers was to use two stage heat thermostats . Stage one started the circulator, stage two started the burner. This was particularly effective with zoned systems.

"I stopped up those pipes to the outdoors on my furnace room"

Serious health hazard. Furnaces, boilers, water heaters, gas driers need a constant supply of fresh air. Vent systems need a constant supply of ventilation air. There are codes to comply with, and there are also the laws pf physics to work with. What if we connected that combustion air supply to the return and added a small supply register in the supply trunk in the equipment room and latched on the lowest fan speed for continuous fan operation? We just provided a continuous (pre-heated during the heat cycle) air supply to the furnace room. And don't forget the balancing damper (locked in place) in the outdoor air supply duct. Wouldn't this satisfy NFGC ANSI Z223.1-5.3.4 "Specially Engineered Systems"? (Allow a liberal 50 cfm for combustion air supply and venting in the equipment room for every 100,000 BTU'S input.)

"I use my fireplace to heat the family room"

And that old fireplace just sucks the heat out of the house right up that big ole masonry chimney so the furnace runs longer. Then when it's bedtime and there are still glowing embers in the fireplace and we lose draft, the house can suddenly breath again and suck make up air down the chimney, right across that bed of glowing embers. That bed of embers produces phenomenal amounts of CO. Serious health hazard. Fireplace inserts and free-standing stoves that are sealed from the living space and get all of their combustion air from outdoors are OK.