With warm spring breezes drawing you outside, this is the perfect season to evaluate the landscaping around your Princeton, Texas, home. A few upgrades to your home and yard can increase your property’s curb appeal, energy efficiency, and comfort levels. Try these smart projects this spring for upgrading your home.
Map Your Seasonal Plantings
Spring is the ideal time to plan ahead for a year’s worth of landscaping projects. Map out your yard, marking areas of full sun, partial sun, and shade. Indicate which windows get the most sunlight and which parts of your yard might benefit from a natural wind tunnel to direct cool breezes toward your home. Sketch out your preferred plantings and look up the appropriate season for each project. While you’ll find plenty of plantings to focus on in the spring, you’ll also want to plan ahead for projects that are best cultivated in summer and fall as well.
Landscape Around Your HVAC Unit
A few smart choices with your landscaping can improve energy efficiency for your air conditioning unit. Always keep the area around your exterior HVAC unit clear for two to three feet in every direction. You can discourage plant growth in this section by placing your unit on a concrete slab, laying bricks around it, or spreading gravel in the area.
A small fence or other barrier will help keep leaves, twigs, and other debris from gathering around the HVAC unit. Breezy fall days often create a bank of fallen leaves around the condenser, but you can prevent this with smart planning.
Shading your exterior HVAC unit will reduce your energy consumption as well. A hot condenser that sits in direct sunlight has to work harder to cool the home than one that’s in a cool, shady spot. Plant a tree or build a trellis to protect this area from direct sun.
Upgrade to Solar Lighting
Exterior lighting is an important consideration if you want to keep the area around your home safe and easily navigable for your visitors. If you’re concerned about the energy use and expense associated with a lot of exterior lighting, you can solve both problems with a solar solution. Install solar lighting in the yard and garden, on the porch, around your garage, and anywhere else you get several hours of sunlight during the day.
With solar lighting, you can afford to be a bit more extravagant. Add decorative lights amid your flowers to create a whimsical glow in the evening, or you can line your garden paths for added charm.
Maximize Shade
Shading your windows will help prevent summer sun from heating your home. Well-placed trees will counteract this problem in two ways. The shade produced by the leaves shelters your roof and windows from the sunlight, keeping things cool. Trees also release water vapor through a process known as evapotranspiration, further reducing surrounding air temperatures.
Deciduous trees are the best option for shading your windows and roofs from sun. These will offer a leafy canopy in summer, but drop their leaves in winter so the sun can warm your home again when temperatures drop. Don’t shy away from slow-growing varieties. Though they may take longer to offer energy-saving benefits, they also feature deeper roots and stronger branches, which are hardier and less prone to breakage.
Build Windbreaks
Though you’re probably not thinking about winter winds in the balmy spring months, this is the perfect time to prepare for seasons ahead. Plant trees and shrubs to the north and northwest of your home in spring so you can encourage strong, even growth along these sides of the home.
Cultivating a windbreak in these areas with your shrubbery will help keep the home warm in the winter, reducing your heating bills. By the time you’re shivering in the winter winds, it will be too late to plant this type of growth, so start preparing now.
Smart spring landscaping will help keep your home comfortable year-round. For more tips on improving your HVAC system’s energy efficiency and increasing home comfort, contact Bill Joplin’s Air Conditioning & Heating at 888-414-4655.
