Maintaining a totally energy-efficient home on your own can be a lot of work, especially during the freezing Utah winters and equally heated summers. But an energy-efficient home is the perfect solution to ensure that you and your family stay comfortable all year long — without paying exorbitant energy bills. 

If you live in an older home, and because conditioned air can escape from the unlikeliest of places, you’ll probably need to conduct a pricey energy audit to even know what to look for. Then, there’s the time and expense of caulking, sealing, insulating, replacing materials and products, and more to treat the air loss. Quite the job!

If this is your second or summer home, it’s even more crucial to save on utility bills. Luckily, when you buy a new home along the Wasatch Front and Wasatch Back, energy efficiency is often built right into the construction process, lowering your home maintenance and energy costs for many years. At Regal Homes, here’s how we do it:

Create Heated and Cooled Air More Efficiently 

Up to half of a home’s energy is used for heating and cooling interior spaces. Today’s energy-efficient furnaces provide maximum heat with minimum gas usage by electronically monitoring the thermostat to ensure precise temperature control. Having the right sized HVAC system for your house is also crucially important to maintain even temperatures room-to-room and control humidity levels. 

Prevent Air Loss 

Your HVAC system works hard to warm and cool your home. The number one thing you can do to lower your energy bills is to prevent that air from escaping, so that it doesn’t have to work even harder. While effectively sealing air leaks around floors, walls, ceilings, windows, doors, fireplaces, and outlets (yes, outlets!) is a given, the right insulation and window glass will help trap air and keep it right where you need it.

• Effective Insulation Solutions: Homes in Utah need to be able to withstand low temperatures that regularly reach the teens and 20s. For maximum heat retention and comfort, 2×6 exterior wall construction allows for fiberglass batt insulation to fill a wider space without breaks or gaps, resulting in less air leakage. In ceilings, blown-in fiberglass insulation with an R-value of R38 prevents warm air from escaping.

• Qualified Low-E Windows: Inefficient windows are notorious for ushering your hard-won heat right out of your house (or allowing heat in). During the winter, low-emissivity coatings on glass windows and doors reflect the home’s interior heat and bounce it right back into the spaces where you need it the most. In warmer months, these windows reflect exterior heat from the sun, keeping the inside of your home cooler while still letting in lots of natural light. 

Get Smart About Your Thermostat

Smart, programmable thermostats increase efficiency in your heating and cooling systems by learning how long it takes your system to reach your desired temperature and activating the system earlier, so that your home is how warm or cool you want it to be, at the precise moment you want it. Smart thermostats that allow for multiple programming settings — like auto-adjusting on the weekends or when you are not home as often — will save you both money and the hassle of remembering. 

Reverse Your Ceiling Fans

In rooms with ceilings of normal height, fans can keep you warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer, which can potentially lower your energy bills. In the warm months, keep them spinning counterclockwise to push cool air from the top of the room down to floor level. At the first sign of cool weather, reverse the direction so that they are spinning clockwise to pull cool air upward and push down the warmer air that naturally rises to the ceiling. Just be sure the blades are spinning at the lowest possible setting.

All of these systems work together in a new Regal home to keep your space comfortable for considerably less money. Have questions about buying a new, energy-efficient home along the Wasatch Front and Wasatch Back of Utah? Please contact us at 385-297-8216.