Tips to lower your energy bill costs

If you want a smaller energy bill, we've got some easy ideas to help you save some money. All right, we've got Olivia Dance live at the Reliant Energy Home to show us. Olivia, I don't know anyone who doesn't need a lower energy bill. Yeah, guys, I think we're taking whatever we can get at this point. Any savings will help you. So I want to introduce you to Bill Clayton with Reliant. Good morning. Good morning, Olivia. You have some ancient artifacts. I mean, a lot of people, though, probably still have these thermostats in their home. They do. Especially if you have an older home. So I want to talk about thermostat settings, because no matter what thermostat you have, there's ways that you should set them that can save you some money, right? You're absolutely right, Olivia. A couple of things to look at. For a hot, humid climate such as Houston, never place your fan on on. You always want to have it on auto. If you have it on on, the fan in the attic runs continuously, and it actually pumps hot air into your house along with humidity. You always want to have it on auto. You talked a little bit about thermostat settings. we don't recommend a particular thermostat setting that's very personal but let me just give you some facts in in the winter time which hopefully is right around the corner perhaps after however for every degree you raise your thermostat above 70 degrees you could increase your heating costs by about five percent wow in in the summertime for every degree that you lower your thermostat it's almost the same about five percent so it's opposite as far as thermostat settings thermostats are very important they act as a governor they're not an accelerator so you're not going to get you know cooler air by doing that or hotter air by doing that so we highly recommend keep it set on one on on one thermostat setting but more importantly upgrade to a programmable thermostat which we have here on the wall so this is a smart thermostat it just lit up i mean it already looks more modern tell us about this and also just how much ballpark obviously depends on your energy company and the size of your home, but how much upgrading to this could potentially save customers? Yeah, I would say perhaps up to about 10% on your heating and cooling costs, which is significant. You know, Olivia, when you think about energy efficiency investments, this is probably the best investment that a homeowner can make is go ahead, go to an intelligent electronic thermostat. They're more accurate, but more importantly, you can program it to fit your lifestyle. And if you leave the house, you know, you have a very fixed schedule, it adjusts to your schedule because you program it in. The other thing too, we tell customers, they always get in this quandary. I'm leaving on vacation. I'm going to be gone for a while. What should I do with my thermostat setting? We say a four and four principle. If you're gone for more than four hours, if it's in the summertime, okay, you're going to raise it four degrees. In the wintertime, you're going to lower it four degrees. So that's sort of the best rule of thumb as far as just getting the most out of your cooling and heating cost. Because when you think about cooling and heating costs they account for about 50 percent of your overall energy bill wow okay and the thing with these two is you can adjust them on your app usually on your phone so you know if you're not home you can also put together a geo fence yeah as you get closer to home it turns it on to pre-cool so it's cool when you get here or are you coming back for a vacation which is really neat as well but yeah go with one of these you know smart thermostats you can just program it to fit your lifestyle and you're almost like on autopilot if you will but you get the most out of comfort and energy costs with these. Thank you so much, Bill. And that 10%, that's huge, guys. Nowadays, like we said, we'll take any savings that we can get. So even just upgrading to a smarter technology can save you big time. Thanks so much, Bill. Thank you. Back to you guys.