Would you spend a dollar today to save one hundred dollars over the course of the year? By making your home more energy-efficient, you’re setting yourself up for years of future savings through lower utility bills. Here are some of the best money-saving upgrades you can complete.

Add insulation

If you’ve been seeing your home’s cooling and heating costs escalating out-of-control, the best place to start is by adding more insulation. Many U.S. homes, regardless of their age, lack sufficient attic insulation. This allows heat energy to penetrate into the home during the summer and heat to rise out of the roof in the winter.

Talk to an HVAC or home energy specialist in your area to learn more about attic insulation, and whether or not your home currently has enough of it. This all depends on where you live. Homes in colder winter climates generally need more insulation than those in sunny, warmer ones. After all, heat rises—in the winter, insulation prevents the heat generated by your furnace from escaping right out of your home.

Seal your ducts

Your home can have the most-efficient air conditioner or furnace on the market. If it’s pushing heated or cooled air through leaky ducts, you’re going to have major efficiency problems. Cracks, pinholes, and other leaks in your ducts allow air to escape through the attic before it even gets inside your home. Over the course of a year, this can result in major energy waste—and much higher bills.

The solution is sealing your ducts. Talk to a local home energy audit and upgrade specialist in your area that tests and repairs air ducts. Using specialized equipment, they’ll be able to pinpoint exactly where your air ducts are wasting energy. Then, they can seal them for good, ensuring your ducts operate as they should.

Replace your windows

The same basic problem (heat transfer) that affects your attic and roof also impacts your windows. If your home has single-pane windows, you’re probably wasting a lot of energy cooling your home in the summer. As the sun beats down on the glass, heat energy easily enters your home. Any air leaks around the window frame only compound your problems by allowing cooler air from inside your home to escape outside.

Speak with a window specialist and ask them what your options are. You’ll want to replace single-pane windows with dual-pane ones. These windows feature two panes of glass with a thin air pocket between them. This pocket is typically filled with an insulating gas, such as argon or krypton. When sunlight hits the glass, this greatly slows down the heat transfer process. 

Put your home on the road to a more efficient future

There’s so much more you can do to make your home more efficient. Check out this infographic for an in-depth look at the projects discussed above, as well as a few others that can help save you money—both now and in the future.