When looking to make your home's heater more energy efficient without replacing the entire system, you can make changes to certain components like your thermostats and ducts to increase efficiency and add more control. Smart thermostats, zoning systems, and even specialized ducts can vastly improve your energy efficiency while still keeping you warm.

Wi-Fi-Connected Thermostat

A smart thermostat that connects to your home's Wi-Fi has several benefits, for efficiency and convenience. To start, a thermostat connected to your internet gives you much more control over its use, since you can change preferences from your phone. This includes times when you might not be home, so on top of being able to turn the heater on before you get home, you can also turn it off and check it while you're away.

Smart thermostats and apps also have scheduling features that let you do more than just keep your house at the same temperature automatically. Some will automatically learn your schedules, such as when you sleep and wake and leave the house. You can also set the heater to a cooler temperature automatically while you're away from home if you don't want to turn it completely off.

Because of the flexibility and scheduling features available on modern smart thermostats, it's well worth it to have one installed in your current system.

Home Zoning System

Zoning systems give you greater control over your home's temperature by letting you set different temperatures for different parts of your house. This works by installing dampers in your ducts that open and close partially depending on the temperatures set for each zone.

This gives you greater flexibility with your temperature control and helps you avoid situations where you leave the heater running longer than you might like just to ensure that certain areas stay warm enough.

Zoning systems will often make use of multiple thermostats even if you're still only using one heating unit, so you don't need to worry about having a lot of extra heating components installed. These are a great option for houses with multiple floors or houses where only certain areas are occupied for much of the day.

High-Velocity Ducts

If you're thinking about patching up or reinsulating old ducts, you might consider using high-velocity ducts instead. These look like small plastic tubes rather than traditional large metal ducts. Importantly, air loss with high-velocity ducts is very low compared to traditional ducts, and age is less likely to affect this. As a result, high-velocity ducts are incredibly energy efficient.

Replacing your ducts will be a bigger process than having new thermostats or zoning systems installed, but if you will need to replace your ducts within the next few years, having these ducts installed in place of your old one can make a noticeable difference to the efficiency of your heating system.

For more information, contact an HVAC contractor in your area.