It can be a lot of work to maintain a totally energy-efficient home on your own. Especially in the summer when the heat gets too intense. An excellent way to make sure you and your family stay comfortable throughout the hot season is with an energy-efficient home and tips to keep it running smoothly. But how do you keep everyone feeling cozy in the heat without racking up sky-high energy bills?
For those living in an older home, air can escape from the unlikeliest of places. You may have to conduct a pricey energy audit to know what to look for. Not to mention the time and expense of insulating, sealing, caulking, and replacing materials and products, plus something to treat the air loss. What a job!
Luckily, when you buy a home from Beacon Homes, energy efficiency is built right into the construction process, lowering your home’s maintenance and energy costs for many years. Here’s how we do it:
Highly Efficient A/C Unit & Heat
Up to half of a home’s energy is used for heating and cooling interior spaces. Today’s energy-efficient furnaces provide maximum heat with minimum gas usage by electronically monitoring the thermostat to ensure precise temperature control. Having the right sized HVAC system for your house is also critically important to maintain even temperatures room-to-room and control humidity levels.
Air Loss Prevention
Your HVAC system works hard to warm and cool your home. The number one thing you can do to lower your energy bills is to prevent that air from escaping so that it doesn’t have to work even harder. While effectively sealing air leaks around floors, walls, ceilings, windows, doors, fireplaces, and outlets (yes, outlets!) is a given, the right insulation and the window glass will help trap air and keep it right where you need it.
- Effective Insulation Solutions: Homes in Oklahoma need to be able to withstand high temperatures in the summertime, which regularly reach the mid-80s to low 90s. For maximum comfort, 2×6 exterior wall construction allows for fiberglass batt insulation to fill a wider space without breaks or gaps, resulting in less air leakage. In ceilings, blown-in fiberglass insulation with an R-value of R-38 prevents warm air from escaping.
- Qualified Low-E Windows & Sliding Glass Doors: Inefficient windows are notorious for ushering your hard-won heat right out of your house (or allowing heat in). During the winter, low-emissivity coatings on glass windows and doors reflect the home’s interior heat and bounce it right back into the spaces where you need it the most. In warmer months, these windows reflect exterior heat from the sun, keeping the inside of your home cooler while still letting in lots of natural light.
Get A Smart Thermostat
Smart, programmable thermostats improve heating and cooling system efficiency by learning how long it takes your system to reach your desired temperature and activating the system earlier, so your home is exactly how warm or cool you want it to be, at the precise moment you want it. Smart thermostats that allow for multiple programming settings — like auto-adjusting on the weekends or when you are not home as often — will save you both money and the hassle of remembering.
Reverse Your Ceiling Fans Rotation
In rooms with ceilings of normal height, fans can keep you warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. This can potentially lower your energy bills. In the warm months, keep them spinning counterclockwise to push cool air from the top of the room down to floor level. At the first sign of cool weather, reverse the direction your ceiling fans turn — so that they are spinning clockwise to pull cool air upward and push down the warmer air that naturally rises to the ceiling. Just be sure the blades are spinning at the lowest possible setting.
Want a more cost-effective, energy-efficient home for you and your family? Consider one of our many options in the Tulsa and Oklahoma City areas. It’s time to be more comfortable this summer. Contact us to get started on the search for a home built with utility bill-saving features. We’re glad to help!
