Is Your Home Winterized?
There is no getting around it. If your home is in a cold climate, keeping it warm in the winter is expensive.
Prices for natural gas and heating oil have risen again this winter. The quickest, cheapest, and most effective solution is bubble wrap on windows. We recommend this for windows you don’t need to look beautiful. You’ll only need water and a spray bottle to affix the fun-to-pop stuff to a window. When applying the bubble wrap, spray the window with the water and press the ‘bubble’ side to the window pain. The bubble wrap still lets light through, and it’s surprisingly good at putting hundreds of little pockets of air between your warm room and the cold window surface. For those windows you do wish to look beautiful, you might try lining your windows edges with the double sided tape and then close them so the tape is wedged between the windows edge and their frame.
Draft dodgers are great for that space between your doors and the floor.
Be sure to use draft dodgers for any interior or exterior doors that have large gaps. Draft dodgers are cloth or insulation stoppers that fit the space under a door, but still allow the door to open with relative ease. Draft dodgers run about $15, are easily adjustable for most any door, and are machine-washable too.
Get a programmable thermostat.
If you have to pick one upgrade to pitch to your spouse, or landlord, this is the one. A slightly smart, electronic thermostat with good programming evens out the heating demands of your big empty spaces. Be sure to purchase one with memory and allows for overrides without deleting the default settings. We purchased one and we set our temp about 60 degrees at 4 pm and then 65 at 6 pm with a drop to 57 about 9 pm. For those cool mornings, we set about 64 degrees at 7 am and back to 57 about 9 am. If you want it warmer sooner, you can always crank it up, but programmable thermostats return to default mode thereafter.
Insulate your attic.
A properly insulated attic can save you about 10-50% off your heating bill. Insulated attics work the opposite way for hotter days. In summer, they help stabilize your homes indoor temps to keep cooling costs at bay.
For optimal efficiency furnaces and heating units should be professionally cleaned and filters replaced annually.
Not only will the furnace run more cleanly and effectively, but clean units will save you money as well. NALA offers an affordable oil burner service contract to fit your budget.
If you find your home is extremely hard to heat and winterizing is too demanding a task, or if your winterizing efforts are having little effect on the large picture of maintaining efficiency and saving energy dollars, consider hiring a professional to upgrade your home. It may be time to replace windows and doors with more energy efficient, insulating models. Similarly, having new insulation installed along exterior walls and roofs, and possibly re-siding your house may cost you surprisingly little in the long run – as opposed to continually heating an inefficient home that is not able to hold the warm air. There are even new insulation products and techniques that are minimally invasive and can be quickly applied. Maybe an exterior insulation that can be blown in without ripping into a house’s walls is the way to go.
All these tips aside. The NUMBER ONE way to maintain a warm home in winter is to find the MOST AFFORDABLE oil delivery company in your area. Call NALA today and discover how you may stay out of the cold.