Here's how to prepare your home for the extreme heat coming to Maryland.
Energy bills continue to rise as Marylanders prepare for a heat wave. Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) said it's important to prep your home now to keep your costs low.
Preparations include making sure your air conditioning and fans work. BGE recommends keeping your home at a constant 78 degrees, which some say is way too hot.
"With a newborn, it's tricky, so I think for the next few days we are just going to stay inside, unfortunately," Julie Wang of Butchers Hill said.
BGE shares tips to cool your home
As neighbors stay inside, it's important to make sure your air conditioning and fans are working. If you're worried about your energy bill going up, BGE says keeping your thermostat at a constant 78 will decrease your costs.
"That would be challenging for us. That's hot. I am not sure if we could do that," Wang said.
Also, make sure your blinds are drawn and windows covered to prevent heat from coming in, replace air conditioning filters, and make sure fans and window AC units are off when no one is in the room.
"Your usage will go down if you do 78 is great, and your usage will go down if you're mindful that 30% of your energy is coming from your windows and simply closing those blinds," Steven Singh, VP of Customer Operations at BGE, said.
Monitoring conditions for workers
BGE also says it is monitoring conditions for its linemen.
"If there's an outage at work and our customers need us, we're absolutely going to respond to those 24/7. But if it was planned work that can be deferred to a different day, so that work group doesn't have to be in those seats. We have procedures to make sure that we're taking away that type of work," Singh said.
PJM, the regional energy generation company, said in a statement that it is expecting electricity usage to hit record levels on Thursday because of the heatwave.
The company is also requesting that large load customers and data centers use backup generation to avoid outages for neighbors.
"PJM's coordinated summer preparations with our local utility partners include scenarios at and above the PJM record demand of approximately 165,500 MW set in 2006. We have sufficient resources to serve this level of electricity use if the generation fleet and transmission system perform as expected," the company said.
