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Focus On Lowering Your Energy Bill In 2018 With These 3 Tricks

Cut Costs

We’ve survived another Christmas in New York, but that just means that worst of winter is likely to arrive with the New Year. Heating is going to be important if you want to stay comfortable, and then, after that, once those NYC summers arrive, it’ll be all about air conditioning to keep you and your electronics comfortable.

We all have energy bills to pay every month, but there are ways to shave some dollars off, by being more efficient about how you heat and cool your home.

Install Curtains or Drapes for Windows

Curtains & DrapesCurtains and drapes aren’t just decorative items that make your home look better, they can even help to lower your energy bills.

In the winter, especially during the daylight hours, you want to keep your windows exposed to sunlight, because this can heat your home and actually assist your furnace in maintaining a pleasant temperature.

During the summer, however, that becomes a problem. It’s not just heat from the buildings that makes New York so hot, glass can admit heat—and even magnify it—once it enters buildings. So exposed windows in the summer are actually making your home hotter than ever, and that means your AC system has to work harder too. You can mitigate this by using curtains, drapes or blinds with the problem windows that get the most sunlight at certain times of the day.

Get Duct Leaks Repaired

Duct SystemIf you own a townhouse or detached home in NYC, you’ve got one option in home ownership that most people don’t have, and that’s checking on the condition of your air ducts.

The most efficient type of modern central HVAC system uses air ducts to carry both warm and cool air throughout the home. However, ducts are just pipes, meaning that breaks and other structural defects can eventually occur.

Have an expert come down and take a look at your HVAC system and the ductwork as well. If they find any leaks, they can seal them up, which will restore efficiency to your heating and your cooling, resulting in lower bills and preventing any small problems from turning into larger, more expensive HVAC crises at a later date.

Get a New Thermostat

Home ThermostatIf you’ve been raised to be thrifty, then getting a new thermostat when the old one is working just fine might seem like a waste. In actuality, if your home is still using an older thermostat, especially if it’s so old it’s not even digital, and then you may be wasting money due to inefficiency.

New thermostats, even on the low end, are now programmable, so you can schedule your heating or cooling to specific parts of the days, such as automatically turning down the heat at bedtime when you’re going to be snug in bed anyway.

High end “smart” thermostats are all the rage these days, and these devices can analyze your living habits, and then automatically adjust the climate control based on your daily activity. They can even be operated from your phone!

Lots of people in Brooklyn, NY have a typical, hectic, NYC lifestyle that can make it easy to stop paying attention to how you’re using your utilities. But every dollar counts, and if you are a little more mindful about how your heating and cooling expenditures go, you can be more efficient and save more money!