How to save money on utility bills with upcoming winter weather

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — As winter weather is expected to roll in, OzarksFirst spoke to experts about ways to help you save money on potential heating repairs or even your utility bill.

"The main thing you want to be able to do is go through your home and make sure you don't have any air leaks. Make sure you don't have that cold air coming in," said Joel Alexander with City Utilities of Springfield. "Make sure you don't have that warm air going out that's going to save your comfort level within your home, and it's also going to save on your utility bill down the road."

Alexander said with the temperatures expected to be in the teens for several days, there are other things you can do too.

"Once we get down to the really, really cold temperatures, go ahead and open your cabinet doors. Make sure you got that warm air flow going in under the sinks," Alexander said.

Bryan Schroeder, owner of Freedom Mechanical Heating and Cooling, said repairs could cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

"General maintenance will help the system from small breakdowns that may happen in the future. Doing those maintenance calls can help," said Schroeder. "Another big one is filter changes. It's recommended every 1 to 3 months to change out your filter for the average household, although every house is different. I recommend every 1 to 2 months simply because you got a clean filter in there."

Schroeder agrees that poor maintenance could lead to a higher utility bill.

"If we don't have any yearly maintenance or dirty filters or in the system, it does affect the efficiency of the system. You're looking at longer run times and if you have gas, whether that be natural gas or propane, you're going to be spending more on gas for utilities and electric for the furnace," said Schroeder. "If we don't do general maintenance and we're not changing our filters, there's a good chance that your furnace will struggle and it could trip on high limit, especially if the filter is dirty or the furnace itself is dirty."

Alexander said they haven't made any gathering additional workers in preparation of the upcoming winter weather, but the utility will be prepared.

"We're not quite pulling the trigger yet on getting additional people in. It's not looking like that, but as we continue to monitor that, we'll certainly take those steps if we need to. We'll be there to help other utilities in case they need that assistance as well," said Alexander. "We'll make steps to prepare with all of our crews. Electric, gas, water, make sure we have the people available, that we need the equipment available that we need. We're starting to do that now. Every weather event is going to be different. We have events we had an event in 2007 that we had 75,000 of our customers out. We had an event, I think it was three years ago, where they had their first-ever rolling blackout on the history of city utilities. Every weather event is going to be different."

The two said other little things can help.

"Once we get down to the really, really cold temperatures, go ahead and open your cabinet doors. Make sure you got that warm air flow going in under the sinks," said Alexander.

"Crawlspace vents, if those are open, that those cold wind chills will get up underneath your house and if you have an insulated ducts, it's going to decrease your heating load or your heating value in the home," Schroeder said. "You could have pipes burst as well. We want to make sure those are shut."