Home Hacks to Stay Warm & Conserve Energy in Your House This Season
Most people start thinking about energy efficiency in their home for two big reasons; they want to reduce their carbon footprint with wasteful expenditure, and they’d like to save some money!
Fortunately, trying to address one need always addresses the other, but you don’t have to look at top end, expensive solutions to get results. We’ve got some home hacks that can put a dent in your bills without pushing you to turn your heating system all the way down.
Insulate Your Windows
The expensive solution is to just get new, up to date windows with vinyl frames and triple paned glass with a layer of argon gas to prevent heat leakage. This gets results but is often more than some are willing to pay for.
The cheaper solution is to buy window insulation film and apply it to your older windows. This is a film of plastic that, once applied and tightened with hot air, like a blow dryer, creates a layer of air. That layer now prevents warm air in your home from making direct contact with the window and radiating away.
Put Caulk on Your Frames
In the same way that older windows are a major source of heat leakage, the frames that the windows sit in can also cause similar problems. If you’ve got wood frames, you have to remember that this is organic material that sits outside the home, exposed to heat, cold, rain, snow and even rot or tunneling from insects.
All of this means that heat can be leaking out. For the more severe damage, you’ll need to think about repairing the frame. But for smaller damage like cracks and holes, a great low-cost solution is outdoor caulk.
Just go to a hardware store, buy some, and conduct an inspection of your frames to look for these breaks. Once you’ve found them, just apply the caulk and let it fill up the holes, and you’re plugging up the leaks that cause your heating bills to rise during the winter.
Change Your Ceiling Fan Settings
This is always a surprising hack for homeowners that have ceiling fans, but it’s a great way to get more energy efficiency out of your home. You may have ceiling fans you use during the summer, or maybe they no longer get used at all thanks to the installation of a modern, central AC system.
But those ceiling fans can keep your heating bills down in the winter! All you have to do is reverse all your settings. In the summer, ceiling fans create a slight, pleasant “wind chill” effect by running at high speeds, rotating in a counter-clockwise motion.
This high-speed motion with this rotational direction forces a breeze downwards that helps to cool people. If you reverse this in the winter, and set your fan to low speed, rotating clockwise, a very different thing happens.
Now, instead of cooling you, the ceiling fans draw up hot air, keeping it moving throughout the room, instead of sitting, immobile, and getting drawn to windows where it can leak out. We can get some harsh winters in the Manchester, NH area, and we’ve got to use our furnaces to stay warm. But with these hacks, you can keep your residence comfortable without having to see a huge spike in your energy bills.
