If you do a quick Google search for ways to cut down on your heating and cooling bills, you’ll find a variety of tips from all sorts of different sources. Although you can find many great suggestions for saving energy on the Internet, you’ll also come across a lot of misinformation. To help ensure you don’t get on the wrong track, today we’re going to bust five of the most common energy efficiency myths related to your heating and cooling system!
5 common energy efficiency myths busted
- It’s smart to turn off the heating and cooling system when you leave the house. The logic of this myth seems valid: if your heating and cooling system are completely turned off, you will save the maximum amount of energy when you’re away from home. Although this will certainly conserve energy while you’re away, your system will have to work overtime to get your home’s temperature level back to normal when you get back home. The amount of energy your system uses to heat or cool your home when you return will outweigh the amount of energy you might have saved by turning it off. That’s why we only suggest altering your thermostat’s temperature setting by about 5 degrees when you’re away for the day.
- Closing vents in unused rooms will save energy. The idea behind this myth is that by closing the vents in an unused room, your furnace or air conditioner can focus on providing conditioned air to the other parts of your home that need it. The problem is that your heating and cooling system will work just as hard when you close off air vents, and the air that would have been delivered to a room will build up in your ducts instead and increase the pressure load inside. This will force your air handler to work harder to fight against the increased pressure, which will end up increasing its energy consumption.
- Turning on all of your ceiling fans will cool down your house. Ceiling fans are great because they can make a room feel cooler, which will allow you to use a higher temperature setting without feeling uncomfortable. However, ceiling fans don’t lower the temperature in a room; they simply create a wind-chill effect that makes your body feel cooler. So although using ceiling fans in occupied rooms is a good idea, you shouldn’t waste energy on running fans in rooms with nobody in them because they won’t make the rest of your home any cooler.
- Cranking your thermostat up or down will heat or cool your home faster. Your furnace and air conditioner will heat and cool your home in the same amount of time regardless of where your thermostat is set. Some people mistakenly think that by setting their thermostat to an extremely high or low setting, their heating and cooling system will work faster to condition their home. The truth is that this can end up costing you energy if you forget to reset the thermostat back to a more efficient setting.
- Installing a high-efficiency system will automatically lower your energy bills. Your furnace and air conditioner’s efficiency ratings have a huge impact on your annual heating and cooling bills. However, just installing a high-efficiency system doesn’t guarantee that your bills will automatically go down. To benefit from your system’s high-efficiency ratings, you must ensure that you have it installed by a qualified professional, stay on top of your air filter changes and get your systems tuned up every single year. Forgetting to do any of these things will make even a high-efficiency system run inefficiently.
If you have any questions about these energy efficiency myths, or if you’d like a heating and cooling system serviced or installed in your home, contact Jerry Kelly Heating & Air Conditioning, your St. Charles, MO, furnace, and air conditioner contractor. We provide service all over the St. Louis area, including towns like Maryland Heights, O’Fallon, and St. Paul, MO.
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