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The importance of furnaces cannot be overstated if you live in an area that experiences extreme cold. Your house furnace ensures that you and your family don’t freeze to death.
Ensuring the longevity of your furnace not only helps to keep it working longer but also helps you save money on repair and replacement costs.
Like most pieces of equipment, your furnace has a specific life span. Just like machinery, it will experience wear and tear as a result of the temperature differences it undergoes.
Minimizing the rate at which the wear and tear occur goes a long way toward prolonging the life span of the furnace.
Some simple Austin heating and air tips, when followed consistently, will help you have a working furnace with effective heating capabilities.
These include:
1. Cleaning the Filter Regularly
Dust and other air particles can clog up your furnace. The furnace filter is there to ensure this doesn’t happen. With time, though, this filter accumulates a lot of these particles.
This means it cannot function effectively unless such dirt is removed. To ensure that your furnace is always heating properly, you need to maintain a clean filter.
Accumulated dust and other dirt particles mean the furnace has to pull in air through these particles. This means the furnace has to work harder to achieve optimal results, hence increased stress.
Of course, you need to clean your furnace filter regularly to ensure that it keeps working properly. Scheduled cleaning will depend on several factors.
For example, if you have house pets, their body hair will be one of the major contaminants to clog up the furnace filter. This means you have to check this filter at least once a month.
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2. Keep the Area Around the Furnace Clean
This tip adds to the previous one. Maintaining the cleanliness of the furnace itself and its immediate area is crucial to its effective functioning. In most houses, furnaces are located in the basement.
The basement also tends to house numerous other belongings, meaning there is likely to be clutter and debris. Keeping the area around the furnace clear of any clutter helps with the necessary air circulation for its proper functioning.
Clearing belongings from around the furnace is also a safety precaution because the heat can easily ignite and cause a fire if things are too close to it.
Endeavor to have at least a 2-foot radius around the furnace. This space should be clear of any items.
3. Use a Programmable Thermostat
These little devices are useful for helping you reduce your monthly utility bills. They help minimize the wear and tear of your furnace by giving you accurate temperature updates of the house interior.
This helps you to adjust the furnace heating accordingly so it doesn’t overheat when no one is in the house or when sleeping. In the long run, it prolongs the life span of the furnace and reduces energy costs.
4. Use Curtains
Closing and opening your window curtains strategically can make a difference in the long run and help lower the heating demands placed on your furnace.
Closing your curtains means less heat escapes to the outside, meaning no wastage. Opening the windows when there’s sunshine means that you take advantage of the natural heating and use less of the furnace heat.
This is especially effective for west-facing windows, enabling the maximum amount of sunlight to drift into the house.
For north-facing windows, always keep the curtains shut to avoid excessive heat loss, whether during the day or night. In the long run, it’ll put less stress on your furnace.
5. Maintain a Good Humidity Level
A certain level of humidification is good for the house. During winters, the air inside the house can feel very dry.
This makes the house feel colder than it really is, not to mention its effects on your skin. An increased level of humidity can help transfer heat better.
Be careful about this, though. A humidity level of about 40% is optimal but raising it too high can become counterproductive.
Lowering the thermostat setting when adjusting the humidity will have an imperceptible difference so it’s not an issue.
Ultimately, you want to take measures to ensure that your furnace works better while reducing heating costs and prolonging its life span. Consistently following these tips will make a huge difference in the long run.
