If you are looking for ways to help reduce your carbon footprint, a smart thermostat might be the perfect answer. This unique type of thermostat does much more than just communicate with your HVAC system and tell it when to turn on and off. It provides a wealth of information about your energy consumption so that you can adjust your daily habits while also including some built-in features that make it possible to reduce your energy usage without lifting a finger. The following are a few ways a smart thermostat will help you reduce your impact on the Earth’s climate.
Learning Your Heating and Cooling Habits
Smart thermostats can learn your daily heating and cooling habits so that they can automatically adjust the settings on your behalf. If you continually turn the temperature up right before you leave for work every day, the thermostat will notice this happens on a regular basis and automatically make the adjustment for you. This will help you reduce your carbon footprint by making it less likely that you fail to adjust your temperature settings before leaving for an extended period so that your HVAC is not needlessly heating or cooling your home.
Remote Access
With a smart thermostat, you can connect to your system even if you aren’t at home, provided you have a smartphone. This smartphone app is another useful feature if you want to adjust the temperature settings when you are not around, so that you can avoid unnecessarily using your furnace or air conditioner. This is an especially useful feature if you are a forgetful person and often find yourself rushing out the door and forgetting to adjust your thermostat on the way out.
Detailed Energy Reports
Smart thermostats offer much better insights into your energy usage. Rather than having to log into your energy provider’s website and look at your usage, a smart thermostat will provide you with your own detailed usage report. These reports show you how much energy your system uses and when you use it the most. These insights can help you identify patterns in your energy consumption and spark ideas on how you can change your usage and habits. The report may even suggest certain changes you can make or specific maintenance that can be performed to help improve the efficiency of your HVAC system. Some smart thermostat models also provide you with cost analysis reports and comparative data with similar-sized homes and national averages. These figures can help motivate you to change your habits to meet specific energy consumption goals.
Geofencing Technology
If you are looking for a thermostat that allows you to make a setting and then forget about its use, a smart thermostat can help you reduce your carbon footprint thanks to geofencing technology. This type of smart thermostat uses geolocation data to detect when you are not at home, and the system can adjust your temperature settings to reduce energy consumption. When using this feature, you do not have to set any special programs or remember to change a setting before you leave. You can simply go about your day and rest easy knowing that your smart thermostat is doing the heavy lifting and reducing your carbon footprint.
Automatic Seasonal Adjustments
The changing of the seasons requires a change in your energy usage habits. How you go about making these adjustments to your HVAC system can have an impact on the efficiency of your system. As the months on the calendar change, your smart thermostat will know to start adjusting the temperature settings slowly on your behalf. If it is getting colder outside, your thermostat will start gradually increasing the temperature before you get home so that you arrive at a comfortable home. This will use less energy overall than if you came home and made a big adjustment to the temperature setting to heat your home.
Smart thermostats are often connected to weather forecasts and can adjust settings on upcoming weather conditions. This allows your thermostat to act in a similar fashion and get ahead of the extreme temperature shift by slowly increasing or decreasing the temperature in anticipation. This enables your HVAC system to run more efficiently, resulting in less of an impact on the environment.
Integration with Other Smart Devices
Smart thermostats are the perfect companion to other smart devices and help form an energy-efficient home. When you combine a smart thermostat with other connected devices, such as smart lights, the thermostat can use the signal of the light turning off to realize a room is no longer occupied. The thermostat can then adjust the temperature in that room knowing that no one is in it to preserve energy.
Similarly, a smart thermostat can work together with smart blinds or shades to help you scale back on your energy usage. In the summer, the thermostat can be connected to your smart blinds and shut them to block out the sun during the hottest part of the day. This will help keep your home cooler by reducing solar heat gain and limiting the energy needed to regulate the temperature inside your house. Conversely, in the winter, your thermostat can signal to open your blinds and let more heat into your home, reducing the need for your furnace to run as much as it otherwise would have.
Temperature Zoning
Temperature zoning is another great way a new smart thermostat can help limit your energy usage. This specific feature enables you to target certain areas in your home with specified temperatures. You can independently heat your master bedroom to one temperature while keeping your living room at a different one. This customized comfort setting is perfect if you find yourself spending most of your time in specific rooms. You do not need to worry about wasting energy heating or cooling your entire home to the same temperature but rather just the rooms that you spend time in.
Integration with Renewable Energy Sources
Smart thermostats also integrate nicely with renewable energy sources such as solar panels. If your solar system generates excess energy during sunny days in Sterling, VA, a smart thermostat can tap into this energy surplus to power your HVAC system. This feature, combined with the other energy saving features of a smart thermostat, helps manage the use of stored energy better, especially during peak demand times. If you are considering turning to renewable energy sources to power your home’s HVAC system, you should also install one of these thermostats to help you make the greatest impact for your efforts.
Smart Thermostat Installation
Meade’s Heating and Air takes great pride in providing top-notch heating and cooling services in the Sterling area. We specialize in all areas of the HVAC industry and can help you repair your existing furnace or air conditioner or address your indoor air quality. We will tailor our services to meet your specific heating and cooling needs and provide full transparency throughout the entire job. Call us today to schedule an appointment.
