Cheaper Electricity Adjusting Your Thermostat
Keeping our homes cold or warm takes most of the energy we consume at home. Even though you have a gas furnace, the motor to push the hot air through the vents uses a lot of energy. Likewise, affecting directly your electricity bill.
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There are simple tricks to have cheaper electricity adjusting your thermostat. Help your heating and cooling systems to lower your energy consumption, thus pay less for electricity. We will go over those ideas in a moment.
Lower your electricity bill maintaining you’re A/C and furnace unit in good condition
With that said, we can help ourselves lowering our energy consumption. As any equipment we use, some will need more than others, however, just like the cars that drive us, you’re A/C and furnace units need maintenance. Air ducts need cleaning and new filters need to be replaced.
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If your cooling or heating units break, just for the service call to let you know what is wrong with it will cost you a minimum of $75. Some repair companies will include that cost into the total of the repair. However, if you ask for regular maintenance, let’s say, twice a year, this will cost you about $150. This does not mean that you’re A/C or furnace units will never break but will take a lot more time to do so.
Lower your energy consumption by changing your air filter
Changing your air filter has several advantages.
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We could talk all day long about all the health benefits, the information further uncovers a more grounded connect among, indoor and outside air contamination introduction and cardiovascular ailments, for example, strokes and ischemic coronary illness, just as between air contamination and malignancy. The job of air contamination in the improvement of respiratory maladies, including intense respiratory diseases and interminable obstructive aspiratory ailments, is notable.
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Keeping clean air filters will keep your air ducts clean, which are very hard to clean. Now, this task is not easy to do, must likely a professional will have to do it. The truth is this: the normal air conduit cleaning for most homes costs somewhere in the range of $300 and $500, with the cost influenced by factors like the size of the home, the number of channels and their arrangement. The normal cost for air conduit cleaning is $35 per vent.
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There are several types of air filters. I categorize them in 3; the good, the bad and the ugly.
The good air filters are the ones that are in the price range of $15 which are recommended to change every 3-4 months.
The bad air filters are the reusable air filters. ($25) I tried this kind and they look very promising. The idea of this kind of air filters is that you can clean it. This is the complicated part, I needed to disassemble the filter and hose off the filth. I was never able to clean it 100%.
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And we have the ugly air filters. These filters barely pass the health regulations. Price range from $1.50 to $2.50. This air filters may be cheap but the quality is below average, and the dust collection is very poor.
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Remember that the air quality we breathe in our home is not the only thing we want to improve when changing our air filters. If we have poor quality air filters, we will increase the risk of damaging our furnace and A/C unit. Which will cost a lot of money to fix or replace.
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How often we need to change the air filter.
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Changing the air filter should be at least every 6 months. At least when the cold season and the hot season change. It is when we have more use of the A/C and heating unit. However, if you follow the filter that you bought recommendations, you will have a better idea of how often the manufacturer recommends replacing the filter.
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As a personal note, I change my filter every 3 months. Also, replacing the air filter will depend on everyone. A household with a family of 5 and 2 pets will be completely different from a single person living in a studio with no pets.
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Pay less electricity, adjust your thermostat
Now, the main subject of this blog. Let’s help our electricity bill to go down doing a few tricks with our thermostat. Remember that almost 50% of energy consumption is from cooling and heating our homes.
Adjusting the thermostat in the correct way can save you more than $50 per month.
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If you are lucky you may have a smart thermostat, like the NEST, which senses and learn your habitat behavior, it will automatically adjust when no one is home and it learns the times the house needs to change the temperature because we are coming back from home from work or school, etc.
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Still, programing these thermostats is not an easy task, and it must be connected to the internet and so on. On a personal note, I do not wish to tell anyone that I do not know when I’m home and I’m not. Price range around $250.
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Programmable thermostats. There are other thermostats that are easier to manage. There is no need to connect to the internet, with a price range around the $75. With these thermostats, you just need to tell the thermostat the times that you need a certain temperature. Usually have 4 settings, while asleep, when waking up, when leaving and when arriving.
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And we have the manual thermostats. Rarely seen but still out there, especially in apartments. You can do the same as the programable thermostat, but you will have to do it manually every day. Some of us don’t have the luxury to have the other 2 kinds of thermostats.
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Save energy, do not turn off your thermostat.
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Remember that turning the thermostat will not help your energy consumption. On the contrary, when we turn off or thermostat and the temperature rises more than what is our comfort, what do we do? We just turn it on. Well, this may make sense, however, if the house gets too hot or too cold, it may take time, non-stop, for the A/C or furnace unit to reach the desired temperature.
Cheaper Electricity Adjusting Your Thermostat Best Practice
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Adjust your thermostat, not extremely low or high temperatures.
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When no one is home, lower or increase the comfort temperature by 12-15 degrees
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Clean your air filter.
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Maintain your heating and cooling units.
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