You expect your air conditioner to provide a cool and comfortable environment while you’re relaxing at home with your family. When you’re away from the residence, though, your air conditioner is no longer responsible for your comfort. To save energy, you may think that your best option is to turn your air conditioner completely off when you’re away. This way, it won’t use any electricity while no one is around to enjoy it. To understand if this is the best approach, we at North Point Air Conditioning & Heating present this guide to taking care of your home while you’re out.
More Than Just Comfort
While your air conditioner’s primary function is to keep you and your family comfortable, it serves other purposes as well. This is largely due to how your air conditioner helps maintain your comfort. One way that your air conditioner helps to keep you comfortable is by removing the humidity from the air. Less humid air feels cooler on your skin, thereby lowering the temperature of your home.
Humidity removal is important for more than human comfort, though. Too much humidity can cause wood surfaces in your home to expand, which can lead to sticking doors and windows as well as warped wood furniture. Therefore, even when you’re not home, you need to keep your air conditioner running a minimal amount to be able to keep the humidity levels low.
Program Your Energy Savings
Although it’s a good idea to have your air conditioner turn on at certain points while you’re away, the last thing you want to do is try to maintain the same level of comfort while you’re away as you do when you’re home. In fact, you can set your thermostat as high as 80 to 85 degrees when you’re away from home. This is probably much higher than you’d normally have it when you’re present in your home.
On the flip side, though, you don’t want to come back to an 85-degree home. To help save energy while you’re away and ensure that your home is comfortable when you return, we at North Point Air Conditioning & Heating recommend getting a programmable thermostat. Modern programmable thermostats allow you to schedule the times when your air conditioner will turn on and off throughout the day by selecting what temperature you want your home to be at during specific times.
Most programmable thermostats allow you to select different settings for each day of the week. Therefore, if you have a different schedule each day, you can be sure to maximize the efficiency of your system.
Make It Easy
To make it even easier to keep their homes comfortable, many customers of North Point Air Conditioning & Heating opt for a smart thermostat. Smart thermostats take the capabilities of programmable thermostats a step further by allowing you to control your thermostat from a mobile device anywhere that you have an internet connection. Thus, for example, if you’re away from home and are going to return later than you expected, you can push back the time when your system will turn on so that you save even more energy.
In addition to remote control capabilities, most smart thermostats have proximity sensors to detect when you’re home and when you’re away. Over time, this information allows your smart thermostat to learn your living patterns so that it can keep your system properly programmed without any input from you. This can help account for changes in your schedule that you forget to program into your thermostat.
We Can Help You Save Energy
At North Point Air Conditioning & Heating in Spring, TX, we believe in protecting the environment by helping individual homeowners save energy. That’s why we offer all types of programmable and smart thermostats for you to choose from. Plus, we can help you save even more electricity by keeping your HVAC system in good shape with regular maintenance and repair services. Or, if it’s time for an entirely new HVAC system, we can help you with that, as well.
To take our quest for efficiency even further, we offer insulation installation services to help make your home more energy-efficient. On top of that, we offer a full line of commercial services to help the businesses in our community run as efficiently as possible. If you need help keeping your home comfortable at all times, contact us at North Point Air Conditioning & Heating today.