Vacation Planning? Save Energy While You’re Away

Are you busy vacation planning for this summer? Before you leave your Delaware home and head out of town, consider the following quick and easy tasks to help protect your home, save you energy, and prevent you from coming back to a disaster.

Turn the thermostat up and leave the A/C on. This is when having a programmable thermostat is really great. Simply adjust your temperature setting for 85 degrees while you’re gone during summer, and set it back down to 72 degrees on the day before you plan on returning. If you have a manual thermostat, you’ll still want to turn it up before you leave, you’ll just have to return to a hot house for a couple hours. But more importantly, do not turn off your air conditioner while you’re away. It’s important to keep the indoor air circulating to prevent the temperature from becoming too high and having a negative impact on surfaces such as wooden floors that are prone to expanding and buckling in the heat.

• Check the sump pump. Make sure your sump pump is operating perfectly before you leave Delaware. If a storm comes while you’re gone and your pump fails to pump out collected water, you could find yourself coming home to a flooded basement.
• Turn off the main water supply. Turning off your water supply will prevent a major leak from occurring while you’re away.
• Use a soaker hose. Set up a soaker hose on automatic timers to keep your flowers and vegetables watered.
• Unplug electronics. Plugged in electronics draw power whether they are in use or not. Unplugging them will help save you money and protect valuable equipment from power surges.
• Light rooms with timers. Light timers can be set to turn lights on and off at different times of the night, making it appear as if someone is in the house. This can help ward off would-be burglars.
• Add antifreeze to the toilet. During the winter, add antifreeze to your toilet to prevent tank water from freezing and cracking the porcelain.

For more vacation planning tips, contact Sobieski Services today. Our goal is to help educate our customers in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC & plumbing systems).

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