Why Energy Efficient Heaters are Important
With many of our bills these days being settled by direct payments from your bank, it is easy to overlook the fact that you may be wasting significant amounts of energy and as a result money failing to address easy to fix issues surrounding energy conservation in your home.
One reason that this is an easily overlooked area is that the information for assessing whether or not you are wasting money is not easily accessible and requires some thought and preparation in order to gather.
In addition, it is not always obvious what you might do in order to reduce the level of energy consumption in your home in an effective way.
In this article we will briefly take a look at ways to initially evaluate your baseline position and to start the process of reducing areas where you may be wasting energy systematically.
Review Your Energy Bills
Okay, the first thing you really need to do is to get hold of as many of your energy bills from the last couple of years as you can lay your hands on. Transcribe the information from the bills into a table showing month by month usage and cost.
If you have sufficient data, in this case your information goes back at least two years, you come calculate average usages for each month of the year by adding the current year’s usage to the previous year’s usage and divided by two.
This information now forms a baseline from which you can evaluate any improvements that you subsequently make from here on out.
The process, will now be that you make a single, or if you are concerned or impatient a number of improvements to the energy lost in your home. Then use the most recent energy bill in order to assess whether or not there has been a consequent decline in both usage and cost.
In this way you hope to establish which areas are particularly problematic in terms of energy wasted.
Use an Energy Usage Monitor for Appliances
you can also use an electricity usage monitor in order to quickly establish the amount of electricity that individual appliances in your home might be consuming.
The importance of this information should be clear, if you find a particular appliance is consuming a disproportionate amount of electricity, you can either reduce its usage or replace it with a more energy efficient model
Practical Areas to Review in Your Home
perhaps the key point is that we want you to adopt a more active approach to reviewing your home to try to identify and subsequently reduce areas where you may be wasting energy.
There follows a list of things that you could review to determine if there is an immediate benefit to be obtained.
- Ensure that you always turn off lights in rooms you are not using.
- Replace incandescent light bulbs with them more energy-efficient LED cousins.
- Shut the door on any rooms in your home which are not in use.
- Turn the heating off when you are away from home or at work during the day.
- Take showers instead of baths.
- Ensure that all your windows closed properly and there are no gaps through which a draft could flow. Seal off any gaps with caulk if you find any problems.
- Consider replacing old window frames with newer double glazed units.
- Make sure that your hot water tank is properly insulated.
- Make sure that your attic installation is adequate. Modern insulation materials are far superior to those used in times gone by. Consider replacing any existing insulation with a more effective alternative.
- Check to make sure that all your hot water pipes are properly insulated in order to reduce the potential for losing energy in exposed stretches.
- Consider reducing the temperature of your heating setting by a few degrees. You may be surprised that you quite comfortable at a lower temperature than you have previously maintained.
- Consider installing a tankless water heater as a replacement for your existing water tank, as these have been thoroughly tested and proven to save money on your heating bills over time.
- Consider reducing the number of hours that you run your heating for.
- Selectively use portable space heaters instead of running your home heating if you find yourself using only a relatively small area of the home.
- Make sure, that if you do use a portable space heater that you purchase the most energy efficient model available.
Energy Efficient Heaters
We'll finish up with a word on energy efficient heaters.
Heating your home is one of the largest elements of the overall energy consumption in your home. Once you have recognized this, you can easily adapt the way in which you heat your home in order to reduce unnecessary heating as far as possible.
Clearly running the whole home heating if you are not using the whole home is an unnecessary waste. It is in this situation that a good energy efficient space heater comes into its own. These little heaters can provide a very comfortable environment, they are very easily controlled so that you only use their heating effect when you need it, and they are easy to operate.
Heater manufacturers have been improving their models energy efficiency for many years now, with many of the top models being very efficient indeed. It is always worth taking a look at your space heater to make sure it matches up with the more recent models. The cost of replacing may well end up being a saving.