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Take Control Over Your Utility Costs

admin • Oct 03, 2013

Three Tips For Regulating Your Heating Bill

One of the hardest things for a family to do is to manage their heating and cooling bills, because different people in the home are more comfortable at different temperatures.  As members of your house make changes to the temperature controls, energy efficiency is wasted, and you wind up spending more for your heating bills than was absolutely necessary.  If you are concerned about your utility costs, there are three things that you can do to get greater control over your heating costs.

Maintain the equipment

The biggest thing that you can do to reduce your heating costs is to take care of the equipment by having regular maintenance done on it, based on the schedule that should have been provided by the manufacturer at purchase.  This maintenance inspects the system to make sure that all of the pieces are working the way that they should and that there is no leakage from the system into the environment.  The maintenance technician should inspect belts and other moving parts to make sure they move like they should, and the technician needs to lubricate an parts that are supposed to move.  A simple maintenance plan will save you thousands of dollars by making your system more efficient and by extending the lifespan of your heating unit.

Set a constant temperature

The next thing that you need to do is set a constant temperature as a family.  Let each person in the family voice their preferred temperature and come to some kind of consensus about what temperature the house is going to be.  Set punishments for children who change the thermostat and allow for a period of re-evaluation after a month or so, so that you can make sure that everyone is adjusting to the new temperature.  You will need to check the thermostat periodically and make sure that it is set where it is supposed to be.  One fun thing that you can do for the children is to take part of the money that you saved on the utilities and take them for some kind of fun meal or activity.  This will help to show the children what can be gained by being responsible about utilities.

Manage the temperature before you leave home

Finally, when you are ready for more advanced controls, learn to adjust the thermostat before you leave the home.  During the day, especially during the week, the home will usually be empty and it does not make sense to heat an empty home.  Before the last person leaves they should turn down the dial, which will shut off the heater and save the family money.  When the first person arrives home, they are responsible for turning the heat back up.  With the growth of wireless and remote technology you do not even have to be present to manage your home’s temperature; you can just log in remotely and make changes to the temperature as you see fit.  This will let you make sure your home is comfortably warm before any member of the family gets home, while keeping the thermostat off during the period of the day when no one is home.

Heating costs will only continue to rise, and the more you do to control your heating expenses, the more money you can save your family.  Heating costs really just come down to taking care of the machines and taking responsibility for managing the thermostat.  The earlier you start doing these things, the more money you will save this year.

The same goes for many aspects of your home.  If you have a leak or you know you have some plumbing that is going bad.  Don’t wait for it to break, or for the leak to increase where you’re not happy with it.  Let a professional Virginia plumber like us help you, so you can spend less money on utilities and more money on the things that they enjoy doing.

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