How to Save Money on Your Home Utility Bills

In today’s economic environment, costs seem to be continually rising while income keeps becoming less. It doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at your food bill, trying to buy new clothes, were trying to figure out how to pay your mortgage loan, everything seems much more expensive. And now the winner is upon us, many of us will start seeing the shock of the home utility bills very shortly.

Most people in the United States have common utility bills such as electricity, water, and sometimes natural gas. In the winter time most of those bills go up dramatically. Anyone who has been affected recently by the economic troubles of the world, is already struggling with reduced income to work with sophists upcoming increase in utility bills will be especially hard this year.

Thankfully there are many things each of us can do to help reduce our utility bill expenses, and save money in the process. Reducing these utility bills is quite simple. It all lies in reducing our consumption, and conservation.

We can reduce how much energy we consume in our homes by using energy efficient appliances and devices. Even if you’re not replacing any appliances at the moment, you can still introduce more efficiency into your energy usage simply by changing lightbulbs you use. You can also install control devices such as timers that will turn things off when they’re not needed.

Your water heater for example, could be one of the highest energy users in your home. You can save money on this in a couple of ways.

1. Turn down your water temperature. Most households have their water heater set to 160° or higher, but this is scalding temperature for humans. You can turn down your water heater to about 120° and this will drastically reduce your water heating bill.

2. Install a timer on your water heater. There’s no reason to keep the water hot all day long if you are out of the house at work. There’s also no reason to keep the water heated all night long while you’re sleeping. By installing a timer, you can have the water heater turned itself off at that time, and turned back on again 15 to 30 minutes before you wake up for your morning shower. The timer can also turn the water heater off when you leave for work, and if it’s not needed later that night you can even stay off until the next morning.

3. Make sure your house is insulated. The water heater should be insulated with a special blanket made specifically for this purpose, so that the heat is not lost to the coolness of the room is in. Also be sure to install weatherstripping around your windows and doors to prevent cold air from seeping in.

4. Adjust the thermostat of your furnace. Most people keep their thermostat set between 70 to 75° in the wintertime. By reducing that even a few degrees, you can save a lot of money on the utility bill. To save the most money, try reducing your thermostat to about 60 or 65°. Install a timer on this as well, since your home does not need to stay especially warm when no one is there.

5. Reverse your ceiling fans. Ceiling fans use almost no energy compared to a furnace. In the winter time, you can reverse the flow of your ceiling fan so that it is circulating the warm air which rises to the ceiling in each room.

6. Look into solar energy options. The sun is a very powerful and free source of energy that everyone can use. You can even learn to build your own solar panels for less than $200 and used those to generate some of the electricity in your home.

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