Derek Brown: Energy Star

1. Before each cooling/heating season, it is recommended that central air conditioners or furnaces get a professional tune-up. This is the biggest step to preventing major malfunctions and minimizing expensive repair bills.

2. A well maintained comfort system will perform better and last longer.

3. Don’t close off registers in your home. Your comfort system needs to deliver a set amount of air. Closing registers can actually shorten the life of your appliance.

4. Probably the most important step that can be done by a homeowner is to clean or replace the air filter every month. Electrostatic filters are the best. Do not run the unit with the filter removed. Check the owner’s manual for filter cleaning procedure. Let a washed filter dry completely before reinstalling it.

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Heat pumps need to run differently than a gas or oil heating system. It has long been thought that you should turn off your furnace at night to save money. Have you ever done this? With heat pumps you are costing yourself money. Heat pumps are designed to increase or decrease temperature at a rate of 2 degrees per hour. Say that you like your house to be 70 degrees in the morning and you have done your usual of turning the thermostat down at night. After being off all night the temperature drops to 65 degrees. When you turn your heat pump on, it cannot deliver enough heat to compensate for that large of a difference quick enough. So it does what it was designed to do, it turns on “back up” heat. If you have electricity, this means a much larger bill. It is better to set a heat pump to the temperature you want and leave it. It may seem as though it is running a bunch, but it is actually running the most efficient it can. This will save you money and keep your house comfortable throughout the day.