Warm up with Town and Country Heating, Cooling, and Refrigeraton

Before you turn on the heat, follow these tips to care for your furnace. 1. Change Your filters regularly If your furnace uses disposable filters, aim to change them every 1-3 months unless you have an annual filter. If you live in a dusty or dry climate, try to change your filters more often to preserve furnace performance and air quality. 2. Ensure your intake pipe is clear Modern condensing furnaces are more energy efficient, generating more heat with less fuel. To do this, they require an external intake pipe for their air supply. If this pipe becomes clogged or blocked, this impacts not only your furnace's efficiency, but it can also cause a dangerous buildup of carbon monoxide. If you have a high-efficiency furnace, look for the intake and exhaust pipes on the exterior of your home. Make sure they're free of ice, snow, bird nests or insects. If you cannot easily check your pipe's status, we can do it for you! 3. Use a smart thermostat. With a smart thermostat, you can control your energy savings by matching your system's heating and cooling output to your home's demands. Run as efficiently as possible by maintaining comfort when the home is occupied and saving energy when it is not. 4. Keep up with preventive maintenance While a licensed HVAC technician should perform major maintenance, you can conduct some preventive maintenance on your own. Before you investigate your system, be sure to shut off power to the unit and wait for the blower to stop. You can then run a sound check by turning your unit on and listening for any unusual banging or rattling sounds. It's also a good idea to look for signs of moisture on windows or rust build-up on the vent pipe. This can indicate improper operation. When in doubt, contact Town and Country Heating, Cooling, and Refrigeration to prepare your furnace for winter and keep it running efficiently all season long.

A heat pump is an all-in-one heating and air conditioning system that works year-round to keep you comfortable. During warmer months, a heat pump works as a normal air conditioner. It extracts heat from inside the home and transfers it to the outdoor air. In colder weather, however, the process reverses—the unit collects heat from the outdoor air and transferring it inside your home. Even when the air outside feels extremely cold, the air still contains some heat. The heat pump pulls the heat from this cold outdoor air and sends it inside to warm your home. When there's not enough heat in the outside air to meet the demand of the thermostat setting, an electric heater supplements the outdoor air to warm the home. Extremely efficient, this process produces two to three times more heat than the energy it uses. Also, a heat pump can be an effective add-on option to use in conjunction with an existing gas furnace. With this dual-fuel option, the two systems share the heating load, but never function at the same time. Each system operates when it is most cost-effective. The heat pump will be the primary heating and cooling system. However, when the temperature drops below the heat pump's ability to operate as efficiently as the gas furnace, the gas furnace will take over until the temperature rises enough for the heat pump to operate more efficiently.

To minimize energy usage and reduce utility costs, the A/C coils should be cleaned at least once a year. It is estimated that dirty evaporator and condenser coils can increase the energy usage of your air conditioning system by over 30 percent.

Covering the unit is not necessary, especially if you have a heat pump that runs all year long. In fact, covering an entire unit may actually trap moisture.

SEER (Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio) is a system for rating the efficiency of cooling equipment. The higher the SEER rating, the less your unit will cost to operate. HSPF (Heating Seasonal Performance Factor) is a measurement similar to SEER, but it measures the efficiency of the heating portion of a heat pump.

Home heating systems represent only 5% of potential carbon monoxide sources. Though the amount of carbon monoxide produced is not substantial, it is important to schedule annual maintenance visits by a qualified technician to make sure all combustion appliances are operating properly and all chimneys and vents are free from obstruction.