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4th of July is a time for watermelon and water balloons, fireworks and bonfires, as well as hot dogs and dog walks.  No matter what your plans are this holiday weekend, whether you are going out of town or entertaining at your home, here are some simple ideas to stay cool and save money.

• Keep doors and windows closed.  If you have your air conditioner running full blast (which it might be, since it is going to be in the 90’s in Southeastern, Michigan), you want to make sure to keep the cool air inside and the hot air outside.  This may be difficult to accomplish if you have many friends and family over, so perhaps try to disuade people from going inside at all or put a sign on the doors, reminding people to close them.
• Jump in the Pool. If you have a pool in your backyard, or one that you can use, now is the time to make use of it!  Stop worrying about your hair and start to appreciate the cannon ball splashes.  Fresh water will feel great on a 90 degree day with sun beating down on you.  Also, while you are drying off, the evaporating water will cool you down.
• Ice, ice, ice. This is obvious and self explanatory, but cooling down your drink with ice will help to make you feel cool while you drink it.  Also popsicles and ice cream are always good, tasty, cold treats for anyone and everyone.
• Barbeque! Barbequing is a staple on 4th of July!  This can help to keep your home cool, by keeping the warm cooking air OUTSIDE of the house.  (Just hope that you aren’t the one standing there and flipping burgers)
• Go down below.  If the heat outside becomes too unbearable, go hang out in the basement!  That is most likely the coolest area of your house (besides the freezer) and you can hang out in cool air, without having to turn down the temperature on your thermostat too far.

If you are leaving your house for the weekend, make sure to turn the thermostat up–so your air conditioner is not wasting money and energy by cooling an empty house all weekend long.  Good luck staying cool and have a great weekend!

Contact Flame for More Information!

image found at: http://folbot.wordpress.com/2009/07/page/2/

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4th of July is a time for watermelon and water balloons, fireworks and bonfires, as well as hot dogs and dog walks.  No matter what your plans are this holiday weekend, whether you are going out of town or entertaining at your home, here are some simple ideas to stay cool and save money.

• Keep doors and windows closed.  If you have your air conditioner running full blast (which it might be, since it is going to be in the 90’s in Southeastern, Michigan), you want to make sure to keep the cool air inside and the hot air outside.  This may be difficult to accomplish if you have many friends and family over, so perhaps try to disuade people from going inside at all or put a sign on the doors, reminding people to close them.
• Jump in the Pool. If you have a pool in your backyard, or one that you can use, now is the time to make use of it!  Stop worrying about your hair and start to appreciate the cannon ball splashes.  Fresh water will feel great on a 90 degree day with sun beating down on you.  Also, while you are drying off, the evaporating water will cool you down.
• Ice, ice, ice. This is obvious and self explanatory, but cooling down your drink with ice will help to make you feel cool while you drink it.  Also popsicles and ice cream are always good, tasty, cold treats for anyone and everyone.
• Barbeque! Barbequing is a staple on 4th of July!  This can help to keep your home cool, by keeping the warm cooking air OUTSIDE of the house.  (Just hope that you aren’t the one standing there and flipping burgers)
• Go down below.  If the heat outside becomes too unbearable, go hang out in the basement!  That is most likely the coolest area of your house (besides the freezer) and you can hang out in cool air, without having to turn down the temperature on your thermostat too far.

If you are leaving your house for the weekend, make sure to turn the thermostat up–so your air conditioner is not wasting money and energy by cooling an empty house all weekend long.  Good luck staying cool and have a great weekend!

Contact Flame for More Information!

image found at: http://folbot.wordpress.com/2009/07/page/2/

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Dogs are man’s best friend.  In fact they can even be woman’s and children’s best friends as well.  Let’s face it, often the family dog is the most loved member of the family.  At Flame we know that your dog or cat is very precious to you, which is why we are joining with the Michigan Humane Society to collect donations of dog and cat food from July 1 through August 31.

You can drop off donations to the following locations:

• Flame Heating, Cooling & Electrical, 2200 E. 11 Mile Road, Warren, MI 48091
•  Flame Heating, Cooling & Electrical, Riverview Showroom, 11781 Longsdorf Rd., Riverview, MI 48192
• Michigan Humane Society, Detroit Center for Animal Care, 7401 Chysler Drive, Detroit, MI 48211
• Michigan Humane Society, Rochester Hills Center for Animal Care, 3600 W. Auburn Road, Rochester Hills, MI 48309
• Michigan Humane Society, Berman Center for Animal Care, 900 N. Newburgh Road, Westland, MI 48185

Flame and the Michigan Humane Society also want you to know some important information about keeping your pet happy, healthy and safe in the summer.  First of all, you should keep your pets away from the outside air conditioner unit.  If there is a problem with the unit, it could leak coolant, which is dangerous for your pet.  Also, shade and water are very important in these hot months.  You should also make sure to not leave your pet in a parked car while it is hot out.

We hope you and your “best friend” have a great summer together, and that you can help to feed other potential “best friends!”

Questions?  Contact Flame!

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Dogs are man’s best friend.  In fact they can even be woman’s and children’s best friends as well.  Let’s face it, often the family dog is the most loved member of the family.  At Flame we know that your dog or cat is very precious to you, which is why we are joining with the Michigan Humane Society to collect donations of dog and cat food from July 1 through August 31.

You can drop off donations to the following locations:

Flame Heating, Cooling & Electrical                                                                                                                 2200 East 11 Mile Road                                                                                                                                Warren, MI 48091-1088

 Flame Heating, Cooling & Electrical                                                                                                          Riverview Showroom                                                                                                                                           11781 Longsdorf Road                                                                                                                              Riverview, MI 48192

 Michigan Humane Society                                                                                                                            Detroit Center for Animal Care                                                                                                                7401 Chrysler Drive                                                                                                                                       Detroit, MI 48211

 Michigan Humane Society                                                                                                               Rochester Hills Center for Animal Care                                                                                                3600 W Auburn Road                                                                                                                             Rochester Hills, MI 48309

 Michigan Humane Society                                                                                                                                Berman Center for Animal Care                                                                                                                  900 N Newburgh Road                                                                                                                        Westland, MI 48185

 Flame and the Michigan Humane Society also want you to know some important information about keeping your pet happy, healthy and safe in the summer.  First of all, you should keep your pets away from the outside air conditioner unit.  If there is a problem with the unit, it could leak coolant, which is dangerous for your pet.  Also, shade and water are very important in these hot months.  You should also make sure to not leave your pet in a parked car while it is hot out.

We hope you and your “best friend” have a great summer together, and that you can help to feed other potential “best friends!”

Questions?  Contact Flame!

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I’ll be honest.  Sometimes, not all the times, but sometimes it is a tad bit difficult to find inspiring topics to write a heating/cooling blog about.  Some bloggers just write about their life, but that may be boring for you which is why I decided to do some research today.  I searched on the Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration NEWS and looked at their blogs.  I found one that I liked so much, I decided to re-post it on the Flame Furnace Blog:

When The NEWS hopped onto Facebook over a year ago, we set the goal to get more “fans” on the social media site than Alan Thicke. And with the help of our loyal readers we were able to take down that pompous, Canadian has been/never was.

Now that we have been on Twitter for awhile (twitter.com/achrnews), we decided it was time to revisit the sitcoms from the 1980s and capture yet another impressive victory. So we set our goals high — the highly respected father Heathcliff Huxtable. Yes, The NEWS was planning on beating Bill Cosby like a drum.

Then a funny thing happened. We got online and found out that Cosby has over 1 million visitors. Not going to lie to you, we were a bit shocked. Time to reframe the goal. Let’s go after Rudy! Sure she was cute in the 80s, but we were almost positive that she had gone down the road of Todd Bridges, Corey Feldman, and Danny Bonaduce and was probably a huge mess. Well, it turns out Rudy is a very well-adjusted adult. She graduated from college and still gets work in the industry and is rolling with close to 10,000 Twitter followers. We just can’t catch a break.

We then set our sights on Theo, a.k.a., Malcolm Jamal Warner. Surely two of the Cosby kids could not have turned out to be well-adjusted adults. And Warner uses three names so the odds that his life has gone off the tracks seemed fairly high. But foiled again, we found out that he has kept his nose out of trouble and is a contributing member of society. And Warner also has more than 9,000 followers. Dang the luck.

But we keep looking. And we have our target: Phylicia “Claire Huxtable” Rashad and her 669 followers. There is no reason to dislike her, but we have manufactured reasons since she is in shouting distance of our 355 followers. Here are the reasons we shall destroy her in a Twitter war:

1. She rode Bill Cosby’s coattails farther than Tom Arnold did Roseanne’s.

2. She accepted Ahmad Rashad’s wedding proposal on national TV only to divorce him and keep his last name. Not sure why, but that bugs us.

3. She has one of those diacritical marks over the last “a” in her last name. How annoying is that? And we can’t even put it in this blog because we can’t figure out how to type that in Microsoft Word.

Time for her to be taken off her high horse. Just go to twitter.com/achrnews and follow The NEWS. In addition to getting great links to breaking industry news, you also have the satisfaction of propelling the HVAC industry to a victory over a 1980s sitcom icon. Who’s with me? Let’s Go!

Kyle Gargaro
Managing Editor. E-mail him at kylegargaro@achrnews.com.

I hope you enjoyed reading this and that it was more entertaining to you than tales of what I ate this morning for breakfast (a bowl of cereal: Fiber One and Special K Vanilla Almond mixed together)

Remember, if you have any questions on heating, cooling, and electrical services…you can always Contact Flame!

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You may have read about E3’s on this blog before:  Energy Efficiency Evaluation.  You may have thought well that sounds neat, but I don’t really feel like spending the money right now….good news for you!  For the month of June only, an E3 inspection is only $49.  This is an enormous discount.

If you’ve never heard of an E3 before–here is a brief introduction.  They are whole house energy efficiency exams that inspect your home to find leaks and places where your home may be losing energy or is not properly heated or cooled.  It begins with a discussion between you and a trained consultant.  That way you can tell the consultant your opinion on what rooms feel warmer, cooler, dryer etc… and give him/her some things to look out for.

This leads to an equipment inspection and an inspection of the insulation (because insulation is imperative to making sure that warm or cool air stay inside or outside your home, depending on the season).  After that the consultant will perform the Infiltrometer Blower Door Test to test for leaks, an air flow diagnosis to check for blockages and finally the Electronic Air Flow Capture Hood Test that tests out how much cool or hot air is actually making it to your rooms.

Infiltrometer Blower Door Test

After all of these tests (it almosts seems like your taking the SAT again?  Don’t worry–not nearly as painful!), the consultant will sit down with you and design an improvement plan.  The plan simply contains suggestions to help increase the energy efficiency of your home and you are not obligated to follow through with any of them.  These suggestions could range from things you could do on your own, such as adding more insulation up to much larger changes involving heating and cooling units.

The E3 exam is great not only  because its results could help you find ways to save energy and lower your bills, but also because it is very interesting to be able to see where there are energy leaks and problems in your home.  E3’s provide you with valuable information, and now is the time to get it.  As you are starting to use that air conditioner, you want to make sure that your precious cool air is not being wasted this summer.

Contact Flame for More Info or to Schedule an Appointment!

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It’s before Memorial Day and it is HOT (as many of you are probably aware of).  Though this is very positive for the air conditioning business, we are aware that these almost 90 degree temperatures are not always that comfortable.  That’s why this blog will be dedicated to ways to beat this heat.

• Buy a great air conditioner.  A good choice would be the Bryant 187B, which has a SEER ratio of 17, making it very energy efficient.  This energy efficiency will save you money in the long run.
• Turn your air conditioner on.  We realize that it is not in everybody’s budgets to buy a new air conditioner right now, therefore we have more a little more advice about keeping cool than just buying a new a/c.  Even turning your air conditioner on may not be included on your list of saving $ acts.  However, you can use it in a way that is efficient.  For example, keep the temperature setting a couple degrees higher than your normally would.  Also, only turn it on when you are going to use it.  So if everyone in your home is at work or school all day, it is unecessary to cool down an empty house.  A programmable thermostat could be very helpful with this, because it will automatically make sure the temperature is moved up and down when it is needed or not.
• Drink cool things. Try drinking cool things in order to lower your body temperature.  Cold water is the best bet, and it is better to avoid drinking too much caffeine (it may cause dehydration and those effects could be magnified by a hot sunny day).  To make things more fun, you could have some cold smoothies or even mix fruit juices in with your water!
• Go to the pool.  Even a quick dip will make you feel cooler as the water evaporates from your body when you get out of the water.  If you are unable to go to a pool; a hose or shower will also do the trick!  (hint-the water doesn’t even have to be cold, though sometimes it is nice if it is!)
• Sit in the shade. This may seem obvious, but sometimes we forget to sit in the shade, especially when we really want to achieve that perfect tan!
• Keep lights off and close the blinds.  A darker room can just make you feel cooler and closed blinds will stop the sun’s rays from beating in.
• Move downstairs.  Heat rises and so the coolest places in your home will be on the lower levels.   If it’s possible it’s best to do your “hanging out” in the basement.  Even without the a/c on, it typically feels much cooler (and it’s almost uncomfortably cold with the air conditioner on).  If you do not already have a tv set up down there, consider moving one down there for the summer, so you can stay cool while you relax.
• Lighten up! Wear light color clothes since dark ones will absorb the sun and its heat.
• Lighten up! x 2. Try to wear less clothing, especially when you are going bed.  Consider light weight shorts and tops, and perhaps not sleeping with a comforter or blanket.  (If you are really hot…you could always sleep in the basement!)

Hopefully these tips have helped and you will be able to enjoy this summer weather without overheating!  Questions about air conditioners or programmable thermostats….Contact Flame!

Some info gathered from:  http://www.care2.com/greenliving/keep-house-cool-23-tips.html# and http://www.wikihow.com/Cool-Yourself-Without-Air-Conditioning

Image from:  http://www.hostessblog.com/2009/02/sipping-in-style-clever-barware/

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Did you know what’s going on at Flame right now?

Guess the First 85 Degree Day in Detroit

• If you guess correctly the first 85 degree day in Detroit, you could win a Free Gold Plan
• The Gold Plan includes:  free inspection, discount on parts, generators, water heaters etc…, free emergency diagnostic and priority on emergency calls
• To guess you have to either:  e-mail kmarowske@flamefurnace.com or cnorton@flamefurnace.com or detapling@flamefurnace.com with your name, guess and e-mail address OR you can leave a comment on this blog or the Flame facebook (search Flame Furnace) with the same information.
• To decide the winning date, the temperature will be decided by 4 p.m. using WWJ’s online Accuweather forecast.  If more than one person picked the winning date, the winner will be picked randomly out of those.
• If nobody picked the First 85 degree day…. whoever picked the date closest to the winning date will win (if there are more than one close days, the winner will be picked randomly out of those)
• GOOD LUCK and watch out for the next contest–Guess the First 90 Degree day!

Spot a Red Flame Truck

• If you spot a Red Flame Truck and call 586 582 1700…you will receive $10 off an Air Conditioner Inspection!

Contact Flame for more information about these contests and opportunities!

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If you have been in a big computer room, you may have noticed that it is often significantly cooler than other areas in a building.  This is not just a coincidence.  Rooms in offices and buildings that hold hard drives, data storage banks, servers etc… need to be specially cooled.

http://www.personal.psu.edu/aes284/twtc/

As you can imagine these rooms often hold information and technology imperative to the company that they are part of and so it would be disastrous for a company if there was to be a malfunction or the information became lost.  There are two different kinds of “computer rooms” and they use different cooling techniques.  There are Server rooms and Computer rooms.  Server rooms house data storage banks and hard drives.  These can tend to really heat up, which means that they need to be kept cool in order to maintain the equipment.  In order to do this, one would need a cooling unit just for that room.  Even though your building may be small enough to only need one unit to cool it, you would still need a seperate unit to keep your Server room at the optimal temperature.

Computer rooms generally hold all the servers and printers.  These need a more complex cooling system, a Liebert System, which through cooling by water as opposed to air, provides a constant temperature as well as humdification and dehumidification in order for the room to remain “just right.”

If you own a company or business with a Server or Computer room it is important to be aware of the fact that it should be cooled differently, otherwise you could end up losing your files.  One should also look out for the occurence of temperature fluctuatation in a computer or server room due to the door being left open.  Therefore, try to make sure that it is closed tightly, especially in these hot summer months.  Another precaution to take is to be sure that data is backed up daily and saved either on an outside drive or manually with hard copies.

Questions about computer room cooling? Contact Flame!

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Extra!  Extra!  Read all about it!  Flame is having a “Furnace Inspection Blowout” where a furnace inspection is only $49.50!!  This is a huge savings and it is a lot less than you could spend if a problem occured with your furnace later.  Therefore make sure to troubleshoot these problems ahead of time.

However, you better act now because this is the last week to take advantage of this offer–it ends January 31.  (If you want free furnace inspections and savings on other things all year round, look into the the Flame Gold Plan)

Questions?  Contact Flame!

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