- Lower the temperature on your hot water heater down to 120 degrees Fahrenheit (55 degrees Celsius).
This is the optimum temperature for your hot water heater. Most people do not utilize water that’s hotter than that, and thus energy used to keep the water that hot isn’t effective. Lower the temperature, save some on your energy bill, and you’ll never skip a beat.
- Check all toilets and under-sink plumbing for leaks or constant running – and check faucets, too.
Do a survey of the plumbing in your home before you settle in. If you find a toilet is running constantly, it’s going to cost you money. You should also peek under the basin of all sinks in your home, just to make sure there aren’t any leaks. Got a leaky faucet? You should repair or replace any of those, because the drip-drip-drip of water is also a drip-drip-drip of money.
- Replace your air handling filter.
When you first move in, you almost always need to replace the air handling filter (don’t worry, it’s easy to do – it takes about ten seconds). Go down to your air handling unit, find where the filter is (it’s almost always a large rectangle), and mark down the measurements (printed around the edges). Then, go to the hardware store and pick up a few of these, then go home and install one of them, replacing the old one. An outdated filter not only doesn’t filter as well, it also has a negative impact on air flow, meaning your air handling system has to work harder to pump out lower quality air.
- Make sure the vents in all rooms are clear of dust and obstructions.
None of the vents in your home should be covered or blocked by anything – doing that makes your heating and cooling work overtime. You should also peek into all of your vents and make sure they’re as dust-free as possible, and brush them out if you see any dust bunnies. This improves air flow into the room, reducing the amount of blowing that needs to happen.
- Set up your home electronics with a Smartstrip or two.
Looking forward to getting your television, cable box, DVD player, sound system, and video game console set up? When you do it, set things up with proper surge protection (to protect your equipment). You might also want to consider a Smartstrip, which allows the on-off status of one device (say, the television) to control whether or not there’s power flowing to other devices (say, the DVD player or the video game console). Having the power cut automatically from such auxiliary devices can save a lot of money over time, especially since many such devices eat quite a bit of power as they sit there in standby mode, constantly draining your money.
- Develop a home maintenance checklist – and run through it for the first time.
This list should include regular home maintenance tasks that you’d want to do on a monthly or quarterly or annual basis. Then, make it a habit to run through the items on this list each month. Doing so will extend the life of almost everything in your home, saving you buckets of money over time.