Summary: Heating and cooling bills seem to keep going up every year. Keeping these costs down, especially in Minnesota's cold winters, is a must for every homeowner. Proper furnace and air conditioning maintenance is important, but there's more you can do to keep costs down. Regulating the temperature of every room in your home to suit its use can often dramatically lower heating and cooling bills. Here's a simple process you can use to customize the heating profile in your home:

What You Can Do to Reduce Your Energy Cost - Minneapolis St. Paul

Minneapolis St Paul metro area homeowners are all too familiar with the constantly rising cost of heating and cooling their homes. Our frigid winters and humid summers test our patience and seem to always cost more with each passing year. Home heating is a constant issue during the winter and keeping our homes comfortable all year takes considerable effort.

Proper furnace and air conditioner maintenance is a must, of course, and annual furnace inspections, cleanings and tune-ups are one important way to keep costs down. Still, there is more that the average Twin Cities homeowner can do to control the ever-rising bills. By regulating the temperature in the entire house and within each room in the house, you can keep your home comfortable for all uses while saving money over the cost of heating an unregulated home. Follow the steps below and you'll be surprised by how much you can save:

• Install A Programmable Thermostat – Most homes sit empty much of the time, while you're at work and the kids are at school. The house doesn't care if it's precisely 70 degrees when nobody's there. Programmable thermostats let you control the temperature in your home on your schedule, even on weekends. You program the thermostat with your schedule. When you'll be home, the thermostat automatically warms or cools the house to your preferred temperature. When you're gone, the furnace or air conditioner is set differently to save money. Your professional Heating and Air Conditioning contractor can install a programmable thermostat, if you don't already have one.
• Seal And Insulate – For all homes, sealing up air leaks and installing proper insulation are critical tasks. In older homes, especially, sealing up doorways and windows against air leaks can save big and make the home more comfortable year round. Adding insulation to attic and other areas can also cut down your heating and cooling costs.
• Regulate Temperatures Room-by-Room – Are you wasting money by heating spaces in your home that aren't being used? Most homeowners are. If you're like most people, you don't use your entire home all of the time, and some rooms are almost never used. Every room in your home doesn't need to be the same temperature all the time. Spend some time regulating the heating in your home, and you could save plenty.
  • Start by buying a few small thermometers at your local hardware store or even the local dollar store. Simple, bulb-type thermometers are fine for this purpose. Put one in each room in your home, in an area where you might be in that room.
  • Set your thermostat to the desired temperature in the rooms you use the most. Leave doors into rooms open or closed as they normally are. Give the house about an hour or so to equalize in temperature.
  • Then, go from room to room, checking the temperature in each room. Think about how the room is used. For example, most people like sleeping in a cooler room than rooms used for other purposes, but like bathrooms a little warmer than normal. Dining rooms can usually be a few degrees cooler than the rest of the house. Rooms that are rarely used, like guest bedrooms, can be much cooler than the rest of the house. Make adjustments to the heat register in each room, opening it or closing it a little.
  • Wait another hour or so, and check the rooms again. Re-adjust the registers, if necessary. Repeat the process until all rooms are regulated as you want them.
• Keep Registers Clear – If furniture or other items sit in front of or over heating and cooling registers, you waste a lot of energy heating or cooling that object instead of the room it's in. Keep the area near all registers clear to help balance your home's heat.
• Close Doors to Unused Areas – In many homes, some rooms are unused 90% of the time. If you have rooms like that in your home, you can almost completely close the heat register. If you do this, keep the doors to that room closed. It makes no sense to heat an unused room and you can save a lot by closing it down. Any time you need to use it, just adjust the register again and it will warm up quickly.

We Help Twin Cities Homeowners Save Heating & AC Bills

Rely on Residential Heating & Air Conditioning to handle installation and maintenance of all your heating and air conditioning systems in Minneapolis St Paul. If you need a programmable thermostat, their expert, trained technicians can install one for your system. Contact Residential Heating & Air Conditioning with any questions about your system. Furnace check-ups and clean-ups and other maintenance can help you control your heating and cooling costs. Following the steps above to regulate temperature control throughout your home can help, too.