Your HVAC system may perform better in the cold climate around West Boylston with targeted upgrades. Additionally, the right upgrades may increase your home’s value or attractiveness to potential buyers. Consider these eight essential HVAC upgrades to help keep your home more comfortable while expending less energy.
1. Smart Thermostats
Thermostats have come a long way since the old analog dials with internal mercury switches. Even with a digital thermostat, the expected lifespan of a quality thermostat is 10 to 15 years. If your thermostat is nearing this time frame or is an antiquated model, consider upgrading to a smart thermostat. Not only does this upgraded technology allow you to control your HVAC system from your phone or tablet, but it also makes it easy to boost your heating efficiency.
A smart thermostat receives a wide range of data. It combines your home’s internal temperature with factors like the outside weather. Some models can even detect the number of occupants in your home. All these factors affect how your home heats, so it can adjust how your system runs.
2. Energy Recovery Ventilator
Ventilation is critical to exchanging stagnant, contaminated indoor air with fresh outdoor air. However, this ventilation process may happen inadvertently through air leaks in many homes. Even with properly controlled ventilation, it can result in significant thermal energy loss as the warm air moves out.
Energy recovery ventilators help reduce that thermal loss. These mechanical ventilators have a heat exchanger inside that transfers heat from the warm outbound air to the cool inbound air, effectively preheating the air before it gets to the HVAC system. Warmer air moving into your heating system reduces the work it must perform to bring the temperature up to your desired comfort level.
3. High-efficiency Furnace
Most furnaces have an expected effective lifespan of about 15 to 20 years. While it may last longer with the use of routine maintenance, it’s expected to have reduced efficiency as it continues aging, adding to the already increasing costs of repairs.
If your system needs replacing or is nearing the end of its useful life, it may make sense to opt for a high-efficiency model. These units have several key differences compared to standard-efficiency models that help improve your home’s comfort while reducing your energy consumption. Additionally, there may be rebates or tax incentives to help offset the cost of a high-efficiency model.
High-efficiency furnaces often have two heat exchangers, allowing more of the heat from the hot exhaust to transfer to the circulating air. This reduces natural heat loss. They also have modulating burners, meaning the system can adjust how much fuel it’s burning to meet the heating needs now. Finally, they may feature variable-speed circulating fans, which can run at slower speeds. These features all combine to create a system that will run more to maintain your interior temperature rather than constantly having to adjust. The benefit is more consistent comfort with less fuel or electricity consumed.
4. Dual-fuel Heat Pump
If you prefer the efficiency of a heat pump, you may want to reap the benefits of a standard electric backup heater’s costs during exceptionally cold spells. The alternative is a dual-fuel system, which pairs the efficiency of a heat pump with the efficiency of a gas furnace as the backup system. When you must rely on producing heat because the temperature is too cold for the heat pump, natural gas is typically less expensive than the electricity needed for an electric resistance heating coil. These systems automatically flip when the sensors detect the heat pump isn’t efficiently keeping your home comfortable.
5. Home Zoning
Most homes rely on a central heating and cooling system that uses a single air handler to push heated air through ducts to distribute it. In standard installations, there’s a single thermostat that determines when to run a heating cycle and then works to heat the entire home. Inevitably, this leaves parts of your home too warm while others are not warm enough. It also increases the heating cycle length by constantly attempting to heat the entire home. This is called a single-zone system.
Zoning your system means dividing your home into different areas that are each controlled with either a control sensor or an independent thermostat. Zones include automatic dampers inside your air ducts that open and close based on whether that zone needs heating. The benefit is that this allows the system to direct the heated air to those areas that need it. Additionally, zone systems allow you tighter control over each zone’s temperature, allowing for different settings in each zone. This is based on what you use it for and the schedule for that area of your home.
6. Whole-house Humidity Control
Winters around central Massachusetts can feel very dry, which creates additional dust, dries out the skin, irritates respiratory systems, and can make an HVAC filter work harder. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommends aiming to keep your home’s humidity between 30% and 50%.
To achieve this level, you may need to use humidity control devices, like humidifiers in the winter or dehumidifiers in the summer. Using small vaporizers or humidifiers throughout your house can consume a lot of power. Plus, they can easily create an environment with high humidity in some areas that may not have good air circulation. The better solution to increase humidity throughout your home is a whole-house humidifier that is installed as part of your HVAC system. These units add more moisture to the air moving through the system, which then circulates through the air around your whole house.
7. Whole-home Air Purification
The winter months can be notoriously difficult to keep your family healthy, partly because of poor ventilation and circulating pathogens. Using air purification technology can help render many of those pathogens inert. Some of the best purifiers for pathogen control use ultraviolet light to damage the biological coding for bacteria and viruses, making them unable to complete their biological processes. This can be substantially more effective than filters alone.
8. Install More Ceiling Fans
The heat in your home rises and ends up at your ceiling, where you can’t feel it. This may cause longer heating cycles and higher temperature settings to get the comfort you desire. Ceiling fans rotating clockwise on low will help draw cool air up, which then pushes the warm air back down while creating a minimal windchill effect. Ideally, you should have an appropriately sized ceiling fan in each room.
For over 90 years, DeWolfe Plumbing, Heating & Cooling has provided trusted home services to property owners around West Boylston, MA. Our friendly and experienced team provides AC and heating installation, maintenance, and repair as well as indoor air quality solutions, including device installation, duct maintenance, and duct cleaning. We also offer a full range of residential plumbing services, including water heater installation and repair, drain snaking, pipe inspections and repairs, sewer inspection and repair, and drain cleaning.
Call to schedule a consultation with one of our expert HVAC technicians at DeWolfe Plumbing, Heating & Cooling in West Boylston to explore the most impactful upgrades for your home’s heating system.
