Heating your home often accounts for a large portion of your energy costs You may wonder if there are things you can do to reduce that extra expense every winter. In this article, we provide some ways to heat your home efficiently.
1. Use Your Oven or Wood-Burning Appliance More Often
During the winter, you’ll likely spend some nights sitting by a cozy fire. Or you may find yourself using your oven more often to bake food and other holiday treats. As an extra benefit, the heat from your oven and fireplace act as a secondary heating source.
This doesn’t mean that you should turn on your oven just to heat your home, which would add up to extra energy costs. What you can do, however, is to keep the oven open after you are done baking so the heat enters your home. If you have a fireplace or wood stove, use it often to heat your home efficiently.
2. Seal the Gaps
An important step towards heating your home efficiently is to make sure your home is well-sealed. When heat is leaking out of your home and cold drafts are coming in through cracks in doors and windows, it makes your heating system work harder.
The best way to locate these gaps is to hire a home inspector to perform a home energy analysis with a thermal imaging camera. You will be provided with information on what needs to be upgraded and improved to make your home more energy efficient, such as sealing openings with caulk or weatherstripping.
3. Reverse Your Ceiling Fans to Heat Your Home Efficiently
This may seem like a strange way to heat your home efficiently, but there’s a science to it. Ceiling fans are used to heat your home efficiently by dispersing heat throughout the room rather than letting it collect near the ceiling.
Hot air rises when it’s blown into your home through a vent or a space heater. This hot air will circulate up against your ceiling until it escapes through the roof or your walls. Flipping the reverse switch on your ceiling fan will cause the fan to rotate clockwise, pulling down all of that warm air trapped against the ceiling. This blows the hot air back into your home to keep it warmer longer.
4. Insulate The Floors and Attic
Check for missing and damaged insulation in your walls and attic and replace or add to it if it appears to be lacking. Heat can easily escape through the roof of the house or through the walls and floors if proper insulation isn’t in place. If you are experienced in DIY insulation installation, put on some protective clothing and a mask and get to work. This may be a job for a professional if you are not comfortable working with insulation.
5. Hang Heavy Curtains
Insulating your windows is another easy step to take when you want to heat your home efficiently. There are thermal drapes you can purchase that have a thin rubber lining on the back to act as a layer of insulation against cold drafts. Take down your thin summer curtains and hang a set of heavy drapes on every window in your home to help keep your windows insulated and your home warm.
Alternatively, when the sun is shining during the day, open up the curtains and let it heat your home.
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