Fall 2013

The Importance of Servicing Your Furnace

If you’re like many homeowners, then you’ve noticed the chill in the air as fall and winter approach. As we all shut down our air conditioners and prepare to stay warm, we wanted to alert our customers to the importance of getting your furnace serviced. Take a look below at some of the benefits of regular tune–ups for your furnace, and then call your local heating contractor to set up a visit from their technicians today.

As your furnace operates, it will naturally develop a variety of small problems and issues. These can range from the fan motor belt wearing out to the burner gradually getting dirtier. Without regular service, such issues will likely just get worse and eventually cause more costly repairs. They can also force other parts of your furnace to work harder to compensate for the broken part.

When you get your furnace regularly serviced before the fall and winter, your technician will thoroughly clean and inspect your entire furnace. This allows him or her to find any small problems in the system and alert you to them so you can approve repairs. This has several important potential benefits to your home.

• Reduced repair. Probably the most important potential benefit to regular tune–ups is that it allows you to avoid many types of repairs that result from lack of maintenance.

• Increased efficiency. If your furnace has many small problems with it, then it will have to work harder to heat your home, which reduces its efficiency and leads to higher monthly bills.

• Extended equipment life. Over time, these many small problems that your furnace develops could cause the system to prematurely break down. Regular tune–ups can help extend the life of your furnace so that it can operate as long as possible.

Many homeowners fail to realize that their furnaces actually work hard throughout the hottest time of the year as well as the coldest. All summer long your furnace works with your outdoor condenser and coils in order to force cool, comfortable air throughout your home. This is precisely why routine maintenance, including a thorough inspection, tune–up and filter change, is so important prior to the heating season. Take care of your furnace before you need it most this winter.

Why Do We Celebrate Thanksgiving?

Thanksgiving is a wonderful time of year when we get together with family, eat great food, watch football and spend time together. But why do we actually do all of this? Is it just about the Pilgrims and Native Americans or the turkey and the mashed potatoes? Those definitely are parts of it, but there’s also something more: something that many of us may quickly forget in the hustle and bustle of the impending Christmas season, planning flights, planning vacation days from work, buying gifts and all of those tasks that we have to do.

Giving Thanks

When we think about the first Thanksgiving meal that the Pilgrims had with the Native Americans, we need to put ourselves in their shoes. The Pilgrims left England in September of 1620 and didn’t actually arrive at Plymouth until December—in the dead of winter. When they arrived, they didn’t have enough food and had trouble locating a suitable place to set up a colony. During that first winter nearly half of the people died from harsh conditions, sickness and lack of food. It was only because of the help of the Native Americans that they were able to survive. So that they had much to be grateful for: not only for their very lives, but for the gifts that the Native Americans brought to them in their time of need.

For most of us, we will never experience a day of hunger or thirst; we will never have to spend a cold night sleeping outdoors because of a lack of shelter. That is a privilege and something unique to humanity in just the last 200 years. We all take it for granted and Thanksgiving is a perfect time to reflect on just how incredible it is to live in this era of technological and medical advancements.

This Thanksgiving, consider talking a few moments of the day to sit with your family or friends and talk about all of the things that you’re thankful for. Whether it’s the ability to fly across the country in a few hours or the fact that you’re alive to spend time with your loved ones, make sure that the people who are important to you know that you’re grateful.