Most people are always concerned with how to save some energy in their homes. We all know that saving energy can help the environment and can make our power bill more cost effective each month as well. This can be a bit of a challenge in some locations if you are dealing with extreme cold or maybe you are in a location like Alaska that has many hours of darkness for part of the year.
Still, there are ways to make sure that you are saving the most money that you can on your energy use and that you are not impacting the environment with your daily activities any more than you have to.
If you have been wondering how you can save money through saving power and how you can reduce the energy use of your living room space, you are not alone. This is the room that most of us spend many hours a day in and it’s where some of the highest energy use items that we own are located like our TVs. You might be afraid that you will have to just spend less time in this room but that is not actually the case.
If you are ready to learn more about how to save energy in your living room, you need to read on for more information!
Energy Saving Tips for Your Living Room
These tips can all help you to improve your energy consumption and make your home more cost-effective and better for the environment. You might use all of these tips or only a few of them for your needs, but all of them can help you to save money and help the environment.
1. Use Power Strips
Plugging all of your high output items like your TV and your gaming consoles into a power strip can help you to eliminate draw off the outlets when you are not using these items. You will save energy when these appliances are in standby mode and they will not be likely to enter this mode while plugged into the wall directly. This is also a good fail-safe to prevent high draw from causing issues with your fuse box and other electrical setups in your home or rental property.
Many people who are planning to be away for an extended time or who don’t want to have to worry about a draw that should not be happening when the TV is no one will actually unplug the power strip to prevent this from being a concern. Especially in some older buildings or apartments, you might be shocked at how much money you are paying every month for power just because your TV and other items are plugged in all the time.
2. Use Drapes Properly
If you have drapes, make sure that they are closed when it is cold out and you want to keep heat inside your living room. You will find that older buildings often have less energy-efficient windows and that you will lose a lot of your heat to the windows just by having them uncovered. If you are going to have drapes on your windows, you should use them to your advantage to keep the heat inside your living room.
If you have wall heaters in your living room, drapes can really help to keep the heat in that you have paid for with electricity. You should always make sure that your drapes are not blocking the heater or the hot and cold air registers as well. This can cause fire hazards in some cases and can block the efficiency of your heating and cooling systems in a dramatic way.
3. Place Lamps Away From the Thermostat
Keeping sources of heat like your lamps or your TV away from the thermostat can make a big difference in the energy efficiency of your living room space. If your thermostat thinks that the room as a whole is hotter than it is, it might be running the heat at the wrong times or using the air conditioning far more than it needs to. Your thermostat tells the heating and cooling system in your home what temperature the interior of the house is and sources of heat like appliances can throw this off by a lot.
You should always make sure that you check the environment near the thermostat once in a while to be sure that you are not causing yourself to be inefficient in your heating and cooling just because the thermostat does not know what temperature your living room actually is. This is one of the biggest ways that people lose money on efficiency each year and you will love getting this money back and giving back to the power grid by not using the power you don’t actually need on a daily basis.
4. Use LEDs in Your Living Room to Save Energy
If you are still using traditional light bulbs, you need to switch to LED lighting for your living room. These lights use much less power and they will last for ten years. They also do not create heat which can help with thermostat issues and heat in the room in the summer. You will find that they cast a nice blue-white light as well which can be really great if you need to see details of your work or you want to avoid the soft amber color of other lightbulbs.
LED lights are not expensive at all and you will find that they can greatly impact your overall energy use throughout your home. Most people make the switch to LED lighting in their whole home when they swap out one area of the house. This is a much better way to generate light and it is so cost-effective that it is well worth the cost to make this change throughout your home.
5. Bundle Up
If you are trying to save some money on energy, you can wear a sweater or cover yourself with a blanket to stay warm in the winter months. This can help you to save a lot of money because even heating your living room by a single degree can require quite a lot of energy to be expended. This is particularly true if you are using wall heaters to heat your living room. You will save a lot of power just by making sure that you are warm without having to change the actual room temperature.
For those who are worried about having to spend money on a wall heater to heat your living room, you might have better luck with an oil heater or even energy-efficient space heaters. Older wall heater units can actually be very inefficient and will cost you far more to use than a simple oil heater would.
6. Conserve Energy by Opening the Living Room Windows
In the summer when things get warm during the day, if you can open the windows at night to cool the house down, you will save a lot of money on your air conditioning costs. It can really add up to keep rooms cool all day in warmer locations and opening up your windows at night can help the rooms in your home to stay at a reasonable temperature all day without running the air conditioning. If you like to watch TV in the summer, you can try to wait until the evening when the windows are open to cool things off.
Being willing to hold off on using appliances that generate heat during the summer months can be a great way to save money on cooling costs. You will find that your TV creates more heat than you think it does and waiting to watch TV or movies until the evening can be a big help to your power use throughout the day. Beyond that, you probably have other things that you are doing all day long instead of watching TV, so having the TV on for background noise is just leading to energy use that you can avoid.
7. Close Off Attached Rooms
If you are not using your guest room that connects to the living room or you have an office that you are not spending time in during the day, close these spaces off. Both heating and cooling will be slowed down if your living room is open to other spaces that might not be at the same temperature and may not need to be as cool or warm as your living room. The more that you can close off unused spaces during the hottest and coldest months of the year, the more you can save on electricity use for heating and cooling.
Even if you have unused rooms in other parts of the home that are away from the living room, these unused spaces might be impacting your heating and cooling costs in the living room and other areas. Closing off unused spaces will almost always save you money throughout the course of the year. If you are not going to be in these spaces, there is no need to be heating and cooling them all day each day.
8. Clean Your Filters
Make sure that you clean the filters in your cooling and heating system at least twice a year. When these filters become clogged, they can make your heating and cooling much less efficient. This can also cause strain on your heating and cooling systems that can lead to breakdowns that are expensive to fix. Cleaning your filters is easy and you might be even better off if you just replace them with new ones each time that you check on the status of your filters.
If you have been struggling with allergies or other issues, this can also help you to feel better. Dust and allergens can build up in your filters and make the air that is blowing into your home be less healthy than would be ideal. There are many reasons that you should clean your filters and only some of them have to do with saving money and increasing energy efficiency.
9. Replace Old Living Room Appliances to Reduce Energy
Any old appliances that you own that are in use in any room of your house might be causing a big draw on your electricity. This is a common issue with older appliances and many people find that when they replace their older appliances with newer items, they have a reduced power bill and waste less energy.
You might not be able to replace all of your older appliances at the same time, but you should consider replacing the work offenders as soon as possible if you want to save energy. There are many older appliances that can also cause issues with too much draw on your electrical system which can lead to blown fuses and other issues that could otherwise be avoided. You might have to replace your older TV with a newer model as well, but most quality TVs are smaller and generate less heat which is an added bonus.
10. Check for Leaking Windows
If you have older windows, they might not be sealed properly. This can lead to moisture and cold air seeping in that should not be getting into your home. You can replace these windows or seal around them to make sure that you do not have issues with cold air and moisture getting into the room and changing the temperature.
This can be one of the biggest ways that people waste money each year on heating and cooling and often it is one that is overlooked. Unless you stand by your windows for a bit each day, you may not be aware that the cold drafts that you are feeling are from the windows themselves. This is often the culprit for heating and cooling expenses in older homes and rentals but you can still often attend to these problems with ease even if this is not your own home.
11. Use Door Bolsters to Save Living Room Energy
If you have doors that close off your living room and you have closed them and are still not keeping the room as warm as you would like, you should consider getting door bolsters. These handy items will block the cold air that might be leaking under your doors and making your living room cold despite it being closed off from the rest of the house.
Door bolsters also help with noise control which can be really nice if you have roommates or other family members who are on a different schedule from you and don’t want to hear the TV or the video games that you are playing. Many people who discover that there is cold air leaking under their living room doors also find that this is an issue with other rooms of the house as well. Hallways and other connecting spaces tend to lose warmth throughout the day, so door bolsters can help keep warm air in the rooms that you actually spend time in.
12. Add Insulation
If you are having trouble keeping your home cool or warm, there might not be enough insulation in the walls. You could consider having someone come look into this and advise you about ways to improve the insulation in your home to make sure that it is up to the standards needed to keep your living room warm or cool.
This can be a process to take care of the lack of insulation in parts of your home, but you will save a lot of money once the right insulation is in place. Modern homes have much more insulation than older homes and this can lead to a lot of wasted money and electricity each year trying to keep the temperature of these rooms from being uncomfortable.
Energy Saving in Your Living Room Doesn’t Have to be Hard
From the simple solution of putting on a sweater in the winter to closing doors to unused rooms and running the heat or air conditioning for only part of the day, you can impact your energy savings greatly just by making some adjustments. You will find that your daily routine and comfort will not be negatively impacted by any of the suggestions on this list and you might even feel more comfortable and at home in your living room once you implement these changes.
Saving energy can be harder in a rented space like an apartment, but you can still get the benefits of energy-saving from most of the items that are on this list. If you are able to make some large changes to the insulation in your home you might get the biggest benefit from this alteration to your home’s energy efficiency. This may not be practical for everyone but the other solutions on this list will offer big improvements to the energy efficiency of your home on a daily basis.
If you are tired of costly heating and cooling bills and you want to save the environment, using the tips and tricks on this list will help you to improve your monthly costs and help save the planet at the same time.