Turning Down the Cost of Heating
By: Oliver Truesdale
One of the biggest household expenses has to do with heating our homes. The average cost in California is around $750 a year, with the rest of the country paying somewhere in the vicinity of $900 annually. The amount can even be higher, depending on the kind of house you live in, where it is located, and what your personal needs are. There are ways, however, to manage your heating bill intelligently, whether it is opening your curtains to the sun on a cold day or changing your heating units for more efficient ones.
Practical Solutions
Make sure you heat only the rooms you use. Close the registers, turn down the thermostat, and shut the doors on areas in the house where no one goes. If you have individual air-conditioners in your rooms, either cover them well or remove them during the winter so that cold air doesn't leak inside. Make sure your home is properly insulated, which means you need to check thoroughly for air leakage. This also may imply that you get your windows upgraded so that they are air-tight. With 68 degrees F as a good average, you don't need to overheat your home. Wear warm clothing and make sure you turn down your thermostat when you go to sleep and while you are away from the house. You can have a programmable thermostat installed so that you don't need to do this manually. For every degree that you lower your thermostat, you save 2% in costs per 8 hours. This means if you drop the temperature to 55 from 79 degrees for eight hours, your costs will go down by 30%.
Keep your furniture away from radiators, registers, and other heat sources so they can radiate heat into the room. Using reflectors behind your radiators will also help to send heat back into the room. Replace your old heating system if it is more than 20 years old. If you switched an older system to gas or oil, or if you have a gas furnace that lacks electronic ignition, you may want to replace your system with something more energy efficient.
Keep Your Heating System Tuned
Make sure you give your heating system a thorough tune up every few years. Oil fired heaters should be adjusted and cleaned professionally every year. Gas systems should be tuned every two years, and heat pumps every two or three years if you are not using a lot of heat. By maintaining your heating system on a regular basis, you help to reduce repair costs while at the same time minimizing the amount of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, particulate matter, and other pollutants that may be introduced into the air. If you have a forced-air furnace, clean the blower once a year. Make sure you have a technician check your furnace fan, paying special attention to the fan delay setting. If you are using a hot water system, bleed the radiators or baseboard heaters once a year.
Heating Options
As you know, there are many heating options on the market, and depending on the climate you live in, the type of home you have, and what you need to keep you comfortable, there is a system just right for you.
Wall heaters are a good choice for use in individual rooms or in a small house or apartment. You don't need pipes or ducts with this type of heating system as the heat flows directly into the room. Wall heaters are easy to install and come with vents for directing the fumes outdoors. A good wall heating system can bring you up to 80% efficiency and is certainly cheaper than systems that include furnaces or boilers.
There are two types of furnaces. One is a furnace that heats air and then directs it through ducts and registers into a room, and the other is one that boils water, sending it through pipes to radiators. Furnaces can be powered by oil, natural gas, or propane gas. Gas and oil heaters can be rated for efficiency by the Department of Energy's Annual Fuel Utilization Efficiency (AFUE), which analyzes the amount of usable heat the furnace produces divided by the amount of energy it takes to produce the heat. Forced air furnaces, for example, are required by law to have an efficiency of 78%. Boilers are required to have an efficiency of 80%. There are many excellent "smart" boilers in the marketplace, created to adjust automatically to a lower temperature when the weather heats up. When you are doing your shopping, ask about automatic "aquastat" controls that adjust the heat to match the outside temperature. This can cut your energy costs up to 10% during the warm weather months.
Electrically operated furnaces and boilers can raise your costs to double that of those using natural gas and are certainly higher than oil-based furnaces. If you get your electricity from solar panels, however, then this is a totally different story where you will be creating enormous savings. Look for variable speed motors, which are more efficient than conventional ones.
Heat pumps or exchangers are systems that combine heating and cooling abilities. These are good for those of us living in warm climates that require a lot of air-conditioning and a minimum amount of heating as they use a lot of energy in colder weather. Ground source heat pumps are excellent choices for larger homes, but are not a good investment if you don't use air-conditioning much.
Radiant heating systems consist of electrical tubes that contain boiler-heated water. These tubes or cables are embedded in your flooring and can be used at a lower thermostat setting as they disperse heat throughout a room, rather than concentrating it to one specific area. This system can also be installed inside walls. A radiant heating system allows you to regulate the amount of heat you want in each room and is also usable for cooling your house in warm weather. The cost of installation is expensive, especially if you are putting it inside an already existing floor or wall construction. Often people use radiant heat for small rooms like bathrooms where can cost between $400 and $700.
If you want to economize, electric baseboards or space heaters cost less than installing a new furnace, boiler, or heat pump, but will elevate your electric bills. If you need to economize initially, this can be a good temporary option until you have enough money saved for a more sustainable system.
Wood and pellet stoves, as well as fireplaces provide localized heat while contributing less to global warming than if you have a system that burns fossil fuels. This being said, stoves and fireplaces are only viable if you are using wood that has been harvested in a sustainable manner, without damaging forests.
If you are building a new house or are retrofitting your old one, solar energy is the way to go, especially if you live in a sunny climate. By adding solar collectors on your roof or in your yard, you can collect heat from the sun through piping that is filled with air or a mixture of antifreeze and water. The pipes then send heat to the inside of your home via pumps or fans. By building an overhang on the sunny side of your house, or planting leafy trees there, you will be able to minimize the glare and heat of direct sunlight into your home during the summer months. By using appropriate flooring materials that absorb and store solar heat, such as tile and dark concrete, you can make your home very comfortable when it is cold outdoors.
Determining What is Right for You
There are some basic rules to determine which system is best for your needs. You need to figure the square footage of your home and then look at the floor plan, the kind of windows you have, the quality of your insulation, and where the shade and sunshine falls. Get several bids from contractors before you make your decision. Ask each one to make an estimate of annual costs in writing, which includes the equipment that would be installed, the amount of work required, and labor costs. Ask each contractor if he or she works with the Manual J Residential Load Calculation procedure, which measures all the essential elements in a home to determine which system is best suited to the client. Remember that the lowest bid is not always the best one to choose. Sometimes this means that a contractor is using inferior equipment and foregoing warranties. Look for the Energy Star rating on furnaces and boilers.
When purchasing your new heating system, you can also check to see if there are rebates on the local, state, or federal level. Often incentives are offered for buying energy-efficient systems.
Oliver Truesdale is a frequent art critic whose interests also encompass finding ways to improve life through conscious living.
