There is nothing like an early autumn cold front to remind you that winter is on its way. Summer may be gone, but winter is full of opportunities to save on your energy bills. Allegheny Power’s Watt Watchers program offers a variety of money-saving tips to reduce your energy use.

A home energy audit is a great step to making your home more energy efficient. It will help you identify cost-effective ways to improve areas of your home that are wasting energy and increasing your costs. Remember that an audit is only beneficial if you apply the recommended improvements. For more information about home energy audits, visit www.energystar.gov.

The following tips address some of the most common energy wasters during the colder months:

• Make sure your home is insulated to adequate standards—it’s the single most important step toward saving energy in your home. The easiest and most cost-effective way to insulate your home is to install additional insulation in the attic. If you have less than 6 or 7 inches, you can probably benefit by adding more.
• Install storm windows over single-pane windows or replace them with double-pane windows.
• Caulk and weather-strip doors and windows that leak air.
• When the fireplace is not in use, keep the flue damper tightly closed. Open dampers allow warm air to escape—24 hours a day.
• Locate your heating thermostat correctly. Mount the thermostat five feet from the floor so that it can sense air that's representative of the room's temperature. Don't locate thermostats on the inner surface of an outside wall, in corners, behind doors, in closets, near windows or by a heat source.
• Reduce your annual heating costs even more by installing a programmable thermostat, setting it properly and maintaining energy-saving settings.
• Keep the overhead door of an attached garage closed to block cold air from infiltrating your house. Also, keep the connecting door to the house and heated basement closed.
• Close hot-air registers and radiator valves in unused rooms with all types of heating systems, except a heat pump. For zoned systems, such as ceiling cable or baseboard, set the thermostat back in unused areas.
• Make sure draperies and furniture do not block the heating registers in your house.
• Open draperies on south-facing windows on sunny winter days to take advantage of available solar heat.
• Use bath and kitchen exhaust fans only when needed during the heating season. Fans draw heated air out of your home.
• Set your heating thermostat as low as comfort permits. Each degree over 68° F can add three percent to the amount of energy needed for heating and each degree below 68° F can save about the same amount of energy.
• Check your furnace filter regularly and replace it as needed.

For more information on how you can get your home ready for winter and control your energy bill, call our Customer Service Center at 1-800-Allegheny (1-800-255-3443) and request the brochure “100 Ways to Control Your Energy Bill.” Or, you can visit our Web site at www.alleghenypower.com and click on the Watt Watchers link.

Allegheny Energy

Headquartered in Greensburg, Pa., Allegheny Energy, (NYSE: AYE) is an investor-owned electric utility with total annual revenues of over $3 billion and more than 4,000 employees. The company owns and operates generating facilities and delivers low-cost, reliable electric service to 1.6 million customers in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland and Virginia. For more information, visit our Web site at www.alleghenyenergy.com.