Imagine leaving a window open all winter long—the heat loss, cold drafts and wasted energy! If your home has a folding attic stair, fireplace or clothes dryer, that may be just what is occurring in your home every day. These often overlooked sources of heat loss and air leakage can cause warm air to leave your home and the cold outside air to rush in—costing you money in the form of higher heating bills. If you’re ready to lower your heating costs this winter, here are a few things to keep in mind.

Air leaks are the largest source of heating and cooling loss in the home. Air leaks occur through the small cracks around doors, windows, pipes and other entry points. Most homeowners are well aware of the benefits caulk and weatherstripping provide to minimize heat loss and cold drafts. But what can you do about the three largest “holes” in your home—the folding attic stair, the fireplace and the clothes … Read Full Post »

It’s important for homeowners to understand their options when it comes to heating or cooling systems. In this blog post, we’ll discuss heating options, specifically furnaces. A furnace is a mechanical device designed, constructed and used to generate heat. Of course, we most commonly know this appliance as a heater. Depending on what kind is being used, a furnace serves to either heat the interior of a structure to prevent unwanted cold from escaping or to burn materials for the purpose of molding or cremating. Different kinds of furnaces include household furnaces, metallurgical furnaces, industrial furnaces and incinerators.

Household Furnaces

Household furnaces, used to disperse cold from within a structure and provide hot water, have several different means of production and require any one of a variation of fuel sources: natural gas, fuel oil, coal or wood.

The two most common types of household furnaces are combustion and condensation. The first kind requires an exhaust and relies on burning fuel to generate heat. The … Read Full Post »

When the cooler temperatures finally stuck around, you were thrilled.

Finally, those of us who live in warmer parts of the United States wouldn’t have to sweat just stepping out of our cars. We are happy to give our air conditioners a break. On a related note, we can also get a vacation from higher than normal utility bills—at least for a few months.

Then it happened: you woke up in the middle of the night shivering. Well, this was certainly new, and not a welcome development.

Your immediate assumption was that somehow your AC system never switched from “cool” to “heat.” Unfortunately, when you checked you discovered this wasn’t the case.

Your thermostat was set to 70 degrees inside, but the actual temperature was all the way down to 65. For some reason, the heat just wasn’t working.

By why? You barely run the heat most of the year, so why would it die … Read Full Post »

Although most of us just think of these appliances as our air conditioner or heater, it’s our HVAC system that heats and cools the air in our home, making our hot summers bearable and keeping the inside of our homes cozy during our infrequent cold snaps. We rely on these systems to keep us comfortable when we are indoors, but few of us know exactly how HVAC systems work.

The four main components of the typical HVAC system are the outside condenser, inside furnace, evaporator coil and duct system. The process of cooling your air starts with the condenser, where the refrigerant is compressed into a liquid and piped inside to the evaporator coil. Air is drawn from the home by the furnace, which blows through the evaporator coil. In the evaporator coil, the refrigerant expands into a gas and becomes very cold, absorbing the heat as it passes through, … Read Full Post »

Remembering to change your furnace filter can be a tall order since it isn’t something you see or notice. The adage “out of sight, out of mind” seems well-suited for this routine task.

But clogged furnace air filters can spell big problems not only for your electric bill but for your furnace itself. 

We know what you might be thinking. “What? There’s another filter in my home?”

Well, it depends. Here in Texas, the filter that’s working during the winter months is typically just your air duct return air filter, the same one you regularly change for your air conditioner. What you might not realize is that it is just as important to change this filter when you turn on the heater in your home as during the summer months.

In colder parts of the country, some homes may have a warm air furnace. In these units, a dedicated furnace filter is typically … Read Full Post »