When winter comes, one of the things that comes with it is higher bills for your home, especially when it comes to your heating system. Most of us just accept this as a necessary expense, because you need to keep yourself and your family warm and comfortable during the winter months.
But that doesn’t mean you necessarily have to pay as much as you currently do every month. We’ve got a few hacks that you can use to lower your bills when it’s time to turn up the heat.
Get Insulation Film for Your Windows
If you have the finances available, and you’d also like to add more value to your property itself, it’s not a bad idea to upgrade to modern windows.
New designs with vinyl frames, multiple sheets of glass and even argon gas layers for added insulation all do a lot to reduce the vulnerability of windows as points where heat leaks out of a home.
The problem with this solution is that while it works well, it’s also a sizable investment. For people who aren’t yet ready to make that kind of financial commitment, older windows benefit from a cost-effective, DIY solution known as window insulation film. You can get this at any adequately stocked hardware store.
Just apply the film to the windows, tighten it with hot air from a blow dryer, and a layer of air is now trapped between the windows and the room. This prevents the warm air of the room from making direct contact with the glass and radiating away from the home.
Caulk Window Frames Too
It’s not just the glass in a window that can be a weak spot for your home’s heat leaking out; old window frames can also play a role.
In some cases, it can be a very big role if these are older wooden frames that haven’t been properly maintained. Cracks, breaks, and, in the case of wood, even rotting or tunneling from insects can all create spaces for heat to leak out.
There’s a relatively cheap solution for this too if you’re willing to do some up-close inspection. Buy quality, weather-resistant caulk and closely go over all the frames in your home. If you see any of these structural defects and they’re not too large or serious, caulk can fill the spaces out and help bring down your heat leakage.
Try Using Your Ceiling Fan
Not everyone has them in their home, but if you’ve got ceiling fans installed, you may have turned them on in the summer to help cool things down. Or maybe you just ignored them because the home has central air conditioning and ceiling fans seem redundant.
But they don’t just keep you cooler in the summer; they can bring down your heating bills in the winter too. Summer usage is easy to understand. A fan at high speed, spinning counter-clockwise, sends air straight down, creating a pleasant wind chill effect. In the winter, try reversing these settings.
Put your fan on slow, and change the direction of the spinning to clockwise. Now, the fan is drawing warm air up, and then re-circulating it around the room. This keeps warm air from sitting near windows, getting drawn to cold spots and leaking out.
We may not always get chronically cold winters in Greensboro, NC, but you can still enjoy savings on your energy bills when the temperature starts going down, and you need to heat things up.