Approximately half of the energy consumed by the average household is due to HVAC.
Temperature control makes a big impact on the environment and budget.
Living in an area with incredibly frosty winter weather and brutally boiling summers, minimizing the cost of heating and cooling is a priority, but I’m constantly searching for ways to tighten up the condo and prevent energy waste. I’ve finally replaced every single window in the condo with a thermal pane, Energy Star rated window. Every year, I seal and weatherstrip around doors and windows. I’ve installed ceiling fans to help push the heat down toward the floor in winter and encourage it up and out in the summer, but just recently, I realized that I needed to replace the insulation in the attic. Although my wife and I insulated when we first moved into our home, that was nearly twenty years ago. Overtime, moisture, rodents and settling had compromised the integrity of the insulation. It was no longer providing an effective barrier against the weather. We had some problems with ice dams building up on the roof and icicles hanging off the edges, and my wife and I debated over handling the project ourselves, but we ended up hiring a licensed HVAC corporation to complete the job. The cost of materials and work was not overly pricey and neither one of us was eager to crawl around the moist attic. The HVAC professionals completed the attic insulation in a matter of hours. There was no big mess or disruption. The improvement in comfort and efficiency of the condo was instantaneously apparent. The two of us noticed that although the cooling system wasn’t running as long or laboring as hard, all of us benefited from more even temperature from room to room, then when winter arrived, the cost of running the furnace was a lot lower.