Smart Touch Energy Blog

Winter is the time of year to throw on a cozy oversized sweater, grab a bowl of homemade mac and cheese, and enjoy the comforts of home. We all love the aroma of fresh-baked bread from the oven or mom's famous chicken soup cooking on the stove. Winter weather is the perfect excuse to embrace all that is gooey, cheesy and warm.

You’re relaxing in your toasty living room on a frigid mid-winter night. Temperatures outside are sub-zero, but you’re nice and warm in your well-heated surroundings. Then, your heater stops. Your stomach drops — what now? You start to panic when you realize you don’t know what to do if you ran out of fuel or heating oil. How will you survive the cold? How will you keep your family warm?

Heating oil customers throughout New England and the Mid Atlantic are bombarded with offers from heating oil suppliers to lock in their price for the winter either through a price “cap” or a fixed price plan. While on the surface these offers can be appealing, they are really a marketing and retention tool for oil companies that, over the last 10 years, have cost consumers significant amounts of money.

There’s a reason why carbon monoxide is considered a silent killer. It is odorless and colorless, meaning many people have no idea that it is present in the air. On the other hand, it’s also lethal.

When it comes to heating your home or business, few factors are more important in the long run than which type of tank you choose to use. There are tanks that rest above the ground or those that are buried below it, as well as tanks left outdoors and those kept indoors.

For a heating furnace to operate at full capacity, it must be balanced in its setting, which requires proper installation. To extend furnace life during the time you occupy a residential property, you must deal with any problems promptly and clean vents and ducts as needed.

Detecting air leaks can be an easy or difficult process, depending on where the leak is located. The signs of warm air leaking from your house are sometimes physically felt, but they often go unnoticed as you crank your heat up higher and higher. Therefore, knowing how to inspect for air leakage is important for your personal comfort, as well as for the energy efficiency of your house.

Questions about when to replace oil tank units are common among homeowners. Some of the most frequently asked questions are along the following lines:

There’s nothing funny about frozen pipes. Cold weather can be bad enough, but having water pipes freeze is something no homeowner needs. Every winter, thousands of homes suffer from frozen pipes that cost thousands of dollars of damage per building. That’s a terrible loss, but the really sad thing is that almost all repair costs of frozen pipes are preventable.

No one enjoys paying higher home heating bills during an unusually cold winter or spending the extra money on increased electric bills due to the hot summer months. As expensive as monthly energy costs are for homeowners, however, they generally represent a more significant expenditure for businesses with large facilities.