Tips for Cutting down on Heating Expenses
• Turning down the thermostat even a few degrees helps a lot.
• Moist air feels warmer. Make sure you maintain adequate humidity
during the more dry winter months. Open the dishwasher to dry dishes and
release steam and hanging clothes to dry will not only cut down on your
electric bill but also add humidity.
• Wash laundry in cold water only. This is very cost effective and most
clothes wash just fine in cold water only.
• Do you have naturally warm areas in your home? Make them work for you.
My warm rooms are the kitchen and the furnace room. I keep the furnace
room door open with a small fan blowing out into my family room. The
heat gleaned just from that is enough to keep the family room warm. When
I do a big baking day, I also run a fan that blow the warm air out into
the remainder of the home.
• On a good blustery day, get down on your hands and knees and feel
around. A stick of burning incense helps to find drafty areas, but even
just feeling for cold areas with your hands will help. Cutting down on
those drafts will go a long way in cutting down on your heating bill! A
trip to the local hardware store will help you find a bevy of cost
cutting products, but simple, inexpensive things like homemade draft
dodgers, towels, and window quilts will be effective as well.
• Turn down your hot water.
• Do you have a fireplace? Most people don’t realize that modern
fireplaces with deeper fire boxes, are not effective heat sources and
the reality is, they suck air from your home. You actually LOSE heat
when you run your fire place unless you have fireplace doors that you
keep closed (basically going just for the ambience) or you can close off
that room and minimize the flue draft. If you really want your fireplace
to work for you, consider fireplace inserts, inset stoves and that sort
of thing.
• Put on an extra layer of clothes if you’re always cold. Adding a layer
on top such as a sweater or sweatshirt OR a layer underneath, like silk
long underwear help a lot.
• Wear a hat to bed. The human body loses a huge amount of heat through
the top of the head. Keep your head warm and you’ll be warmer. If you’re
a bit chilled crawling into bed, make a microwave cozie to warm it up
first!
• Keep a lap quilt for those times when you’re sitting down and reading
a good book and getting cold versus turning up the heat. Sticking that
microwave cozie under the quilt with you is pretty nice, too.
• Consider major home improvements. We have our garage under one end of
our home and that end of the house was always cold. The old wooden doors
had almost no insulation value (R-value), let in snow and cold air from
underneath and barely kept the garage above freezing. We invested about
$1800 to have modern, well insulated doors installed and the results
were amazing! The average garage temp is now about 45 degrees, that end
of the house is much warmer and we have averaged about $400 LESS in
heating expenses per year. Major things like new windows and doors can
be a bit more costly and take more planning and saving, but will be
worth it in the long run.
For more ways to save money in your home,
check out our other
frugal tips.