Winter not only comes with cold, it also comes with high energy bills. Did you know you don’t have to spend a lot of money to keep your house warm? Here are tricks given by heating service repair professionals that you can use to your advantage:

Keep the thermostat settings low

Did you know you save 3 percent of your heating bill for every degree you lower over a period of 24 hours? You can imagine the amount of energy you will save by keeping your thermostat setting low the entire heating season.

Most people keep their thermostat settings at 68 during the day and 55 at night. For you to save energy you should lower this temperature when you aren’t in the house or sleeping.

You can still keep the setting low even during the rest of the time, but you should have an extra layer of clothing. For example, wear a warm sweater, thick socks, thick socks or slippers that will keep you warm the rest of the time.

For you to have an easy time controlling your temperature, make use of a programmable thermostat.

Heat your home in zones

If you have a large house, unless you have a lot of people over, you don’t use all of the rooms. Why waste money heating the rooms you aren’t using? To save money, only heat the areas you are currently using. For example, when you are in the sitting room, use a small furnace or any other heating unit to heat only that room.

When you move to the bedroom, move with your portable heating appliance or set the system to only heat that room. If you diligently observe this trick, you will find yourself saving a lot of money at the end of the month.

Turn down the heat at night

At night, you are sleeping and you are most likely covered with blankets. This means that you don’t need a lot of heat. Due to this, you don’t need to spend a lot of money to keep your house warm.

Once your family goes to bed, put heavy blankets on their beds and turn down the thermostat settings. You should turn it down as much as you can.

Use ceiling fans

Most people use ceiling fans to keep their houses cool, but did you know that you can also use them to keep the house warm? When you turn on the fan, you move the warm air down from the ceiling thus keeping you warm. Do you have a house with high ceilings? This is a very helpful trick.

Keep the heating system in top shape

You will spend a lot of money heating your house if you don’t properly maintain your heating system. The cool thing is that it’s very easy to do it. One of the things you should do is to regularly clean the air filters.

You don’t need to hire a professional to help you with the cleaning. All you need to do is to open their compartment and clean them. It’s common to find the filters too dirty or damaged. In such a scenario, you should replace them with better, higher quality pieces.

Before the heating season begins, you should ask a heating system tune-up professional to inspect your unit to determine whether it’s in good condition for the upcoming task.

If the heating season lasts a few months, in the middle of the season you should consider hiring a professional to inspect the unit and repair any faulty parts.

Get rid of an old appliance

Just like an old car, an old heating unit will consume a lot of heat. If your heating appliance is more than 10 years, you should consider getting another before the heating season begins. When buying the new unit, go for a high-quality one with a high energy rating.

Let the sun in

It’s common for most people to keep the windows closed during winter. While there is nothing wrong with protecting yourself from the cold, you should consider opening the windows especially when the sun is up.

HVAC companies McLean observe that by doing so, you keep the house warm thus you don’t need to use the heating appliances.