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| Energy saving Tips |
Route your dryer vent indoors during the winter. I first learned this piece of advice in the 70s as a way to lower our winter energy use. What I discovered instead is that all that extra moisture led to damaged paint, warped doors, and mildewy walls. A better energy savings strategy is to replace your exterior dryer vent cover with one that is leak-resistant.
Reverse ceiling fans during winter. We all know that running ceiling fans during the summer helps circulate the air in our homes and make us feel cooler. Studies now show that reversing the ceiling fans in the winter doesn’t do anything except make the room feel drafty while increasing our power bill too.
Closing hot air registers in unused rooms. On the days we use our fireplace insert to heat our home, closing doors and registers helps contain the heat to the parts of the house we are using. This piece of advice however does not work when your home is being heated with a central gas or electric furnace. Studies from the Lawrence Berkeley National Libraries demonstrated that energy use actually increases when registers are closed due to all that hot air leaking out from the ducts.
Keeping your thermostat at the same temperature 24 hours a day uses less energy than turning it down at night. My gas company still recommends this practice which is a bunch of hooey as our family discovered. The first year we ignored the advice and turned our thermostat down to 50 degrees at night and back to 68 during the day, our gas bill dropped by a whopping 30%.
While some of these tips may have done some good in the 70s, today’s contemporary homes are already energy efficient. While following these energy saving tips may seem the right thing to do, in the end they actually don’t save any energy at all.
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