Hosting This Holiday? Tips to Keep Heating Costs Low

Cost-Efficient Wintertime Heating

Just like festive decorations and tasty treats, your home’s heating system is essential when hosting guests for the holidays. But just as you want your family and friends to feel warm, comfortable, and content, you also want to avoid a spike in your energy bill. Keep your visitors happy and heating costs low with these tips from Bloomington Heating & Air.

How To Make Rooms Less Chilly

Ideally, your heating system should distribute warm air evenly to all rooms in the house. If your guests’ rooms are cooler than the rest of the house, one of several causes may be responsible.

Windows

During winters in Bloomington, heating costs can rise by 10 percent to 25 percent due to warm air leaking out of poorly insulated windows. A permanent solution is to install insulated, double-pane windows that prevent air leaks. If you’re in a time crunch before a holiday affair, you can combat heat loss and drafts with weather stripping along the window edges.

Insulation

Insulation isn’t always even in the walls and ceilings of a home. In winter, air leaks caused by gaps in the insulation can cool a room. One solution is to upgrade your home with foam-based insulation that applies evenly. You can also address gaps directly by feeling for cold spots with your hand on the wall and adding insulation to those areas.

Leaky Or Disconnected Ducts

No matter how high the thermostat is turned up, leaks in the ductwork can siphon out warm air before it reaches your guests. A disconnected section of ductwork, meanwhile, could divert air before it reaches the vents in individual rooms.

As far as heating repairs in Bloomington go, ductwork leaks and disconnections are easy for technicians to address. However, since ductwork is concealed behind walls and ceilings, these issues can remain unnoticed for years. As a consequence, homeowners could spend years paying high energy bills for wasted heat.

In the course of a routine inspection, technicians can find and repair ductwork issues. If you’ve been putting off HVAC maintenance and repairs, the holidays are a perfect occasion to schedule them.

Poorly Designed Ducts

Heat is lost as air travels. To prevent heat loss subsequent high energy bills, ductwork should be insulated and laid in the shortest route from the furnace to each room in a home. But sometimes the opposite is true, and the result is rooms farther from the heater tend to be cooler.

A technician can add exterior insulation to ductwork to keep the air warm as it travels to the rooms where your guests are staying. Ductwork that’s laid in a labyrinth, on the other hand, could be replaced with more efficiently routed ducts.

Another option is to add a second HVAC unit to service the parts of the home away from the original heater.

Lower The Thermostat When Cooking

From colorful cookies to elegant roasts, foods prepared in the oven are a staple of holiday events. Yet the heat used to cook a festive feast can emanate from the kitchen and overheat nearby parts of the home. If you anticipate having the oven on for much of the day, preemptively lower the thermostat to compensate. Also, for the sake of energy consumption, don’t rely on an oven as a sole heating system — a furnace is much more efficient.

Use Fans Sparingly

Many furnaces have blowers with fans that distribute air nearby. When a room becomes too warm, you can turn off the blower. Ceiling and oscillating fans, because of their motors, generate heat as well. They also only cool people who are sweating. So, unless you’re warm enough to sweat, fans will only compound the problem of a warm room. Instead, wear fewer layers of clothing and open a window for air.