I just got our utility bill in the mail for last month.\u00a0 It looks like we dodged another bullet for the 2022-23 heating season.\u00a0 With our local utility co-op, we participate in the budget plan, so that we don’t have to pay the full bill month to month.\u00a0 Which has been a blessing ever since we opted to do it, as when we had just started living here, there were some months when our bill was somewhere between $400-500.\u00a0 Of course, living in a house that was constructed in the late 1830’s has a lot to do with that, since it doesn’t have insulation in the walls, and though it does have a double layered brick exterior, I would imagine there are plenty of things we could do to alleviate some of the cost, but we don’t have thousands of dollars to spread in those directions.<\/p>\n
We did upgrade the heating\/cooling equipment in the house over the past 2 years, however.\u00a0 We’d been getting the NG furnace serviced by a local business, but after having a disagreement with them about a misdiagnosis of carbon monoxide (their tech had stated we had a buildup of CO in the house and needed to have the furnace replaced immediately, we contracted with another outfit and they said no such buildup was present) we decided to switch to the company that gave us the green light, we’d heard good things about them from others, and it seemed like a good fit for us.\u00a0 We asked for an estimate on upgrading the furnace and what they offered was far and away better than many of the other providers in the area.\u00a0 Too, they were willing to work with us on possibly adding a central air component to the system for a reasonable cost, so we went ahead with the conversion beginning in the fall of 2021.\u00a0 The following spring we added the central air and immediately our utility prices became more manageable.<\/p>\n
Even with the cost of natural gas spiking this past year, the upgraded furnace didn’t soak us for a lot of $$.\u00a0 Granted, we kept the thermostat between 67 and 65, and at night dropped it to 62-64 depending on what it was doing outside.\u00a0 Even when it was bone-chillingly cold outside, the house managed to stay fairly warm, though at least one of the rooms in the house didn’t manage to stay toasty (the master bedroom if you’re wondering) but we usually sleep under several blankets, so we made do without something like a space heater in the room.<\/p>\n
Lastly, we discovered in 2022 that our utility bills actually went\u00a0down<\/strong> over the course of the summer.\u00a0 Previously we were running 2 window AC units on opposite ends of the house, and utilizing fans in the remainder trying to keep the house cool.\u00a0 With the central air component running things, the house stayed cool for the most part, at the very least the downstairs was very nice.\u00a0 The upstairs, another story entirely.\u00a0 I’m thinking we need to have someone come look at our attic and determine whether or not we need to upgrade the insulation.\u00a0 That’s one thing that hasn’t been attended to in at least 20-plus years.<\/p>\n Adding that to the 2023 to-do list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I just got our utility bill in the mail for last month.\u00a0 It looks like we dodged another bullet for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,57],"tags":[59,58,60,61],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-heating-and-cooling","category-house","tag-central-air","tag-heating-and-cooling","tag-summertime","tag-wintertime"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions\/78"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/work-and-play.caff-pow.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}