If you own a home here in the United States, it’s more likely than not that your energy costs end up much higher than what you’d like. In many cases, the bulk of the energy usage will stem from heating and cooling costs. After all, heating and cooling costs alone can easily make up as much as half of the energy bill in the typical home, if not even more than that. Fortunately, there are many steps that can be taken to reduce these heating and cooling costs by quite a dramatic amount.
For instance, small things like investing in regular servicing and maintenance is a must. Ideally, you’ll have your heating and cooling systems looked at by a professional HVAC contractor at least twice throughout the year. This will not only assure you that there are no problems with your HVAC systems, but will help to keep them running quite efficiently, something that will work to keep your heating and cooling costs as low as they can possibly be.
Of course, there are more steps that the typical home owner will also be able to take in order to reduce such costs. For instance, the average home owner might decide to install a programmable thermostat. The programmable thermostat can be ideal in particular for winter months, when it can become tempting to turn up the heat higher than what might be really necessary – and to leave it there for too long of a period of time. As simply turning your thermostat down a mere seven to ten degrees can knock as much as 10% off of your energy costs on a yearly basis, a programmable thermostat is a sound investment for most households to make.
In addition to this, households can invest in various types of insulation, such as spray foam insulation. Spray foam insulation has become widely accessible and therefore widely utilized all throughout the United States, and many people have seen the incredible results of adding in spray foam insulation to their homes. In fact, even just adding spray foam insulation to an attic space has been known to lower heating and cooling costs by as much has 60% on a monthly basis. No matter how you look at things, this is an incredibly significant amount of savings for just about any given household here in the United States.
Of course, spray foam kits should only and always be installed and used by professionals with training in the field. After all, these professionals will have the tools that they need to do the job. From work gloves to staple guns to the spray foam kit for actually installing the insulation in question, such workers will be much better equipped than the average home owner, who might have work gloves but likely not much else. People who are trained in such matters will also know how to use such work gloves and, aside from the work gloves, such other power tools and power tool accessories. Even when you’re wearing work gloves, using such things can all too easily prove to be dangerous, and it’s important to know how to use them properly, work gloves or not (though you should always wear work gloves for an added layer of protection, no matter how experienced in the field you might be).
Aside from work gloves and tape guns and all of the supplies that professionals have, as well as all of the safety training, the overall training that these insulation professionals bring to the table will lead to a high quality end result. At the end of the day, paying for professionals is more than worth the end result that they can give, an end result that likely would not even be possible without their help. Here in the United States, energy costs can certainly be high, especially those that are related to heating and cooling services alike. However, lowering them is certainly not impossible and can be done in a number of varying ways, from turning down the thermostat to adding insulation.