If you know that your home could be more energy efficient, you might want to start from the outside to help bring this efficiency about. While there are plenty of things that you could do inside of your home, there are also all kinds of things to do from the outside as well, especially when it comes to making your HVAC system more efficient.
To help you see how this can be done, here are three tips for maximizing the energy efficiency of your home from the outside.
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Use Your Landscaping To Your Advantage
One thing that you can do to help keep your home more efficient as it runs your HVAC system is to get creative with how you use your landscaping.
In the summer and hotter months, if you have mature trees close to your home to offer some shade, your home will automatically stay a bit cooler and keep you from having to turn your air conditioning on as much. And in the winter, the trees will lose their leaves and help more sunlight get to your home to heat it up. Along with this, if you have shrubs or other plants that are close to your home, they can also help to give shade to the home in the summer and a little bit more insulation around your home during the cooler months, too.
Think About The Color Of Your Home
The color of your home can also help with your energy efficiency.
While having lighter colors on the exterior of your home will help to keep the sun from absorbing too much into the materials that make up your house, arguably the best way to take advantage of this is to have a light-colored roof.
Roofs that will reflect more sunlight than they absorb can help to keep your whole home much cooler in the hot months. So if you can, try to either make your roof a lighter color or find another way to reflect some of the heat back off of your home.
Install Storm Windows
Installing storm windows is another great way to make your home more energy efficient, especially if you live in an older or historical home. Putting storm windows either inside or on the outside of your home will put another layer between your home and the outside world at a vital place in your home’s structure. This additional layer will help with insulations and keep things cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter.
If you want to make your home more energy efficient by making some changes to the exterior of your home, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you see just how this can be done.
