If you take some very basic measures to insulate your home before the start of the cooler seasons, you will never find yourself in a freezing house cranking up the heating system unnecessarily.
You will always be quite warm thanks to the fact that your dwelling is so well insulated that it loses a minimum amount of warmth in the first place. There are also some things you can do that can help keep the warm air circulating through your place.
5 Hacks For Keeping Heat In Your Home
1. Insulate your windows by caulking all of your window frames. You can buy caulking meant for this purpose at a hardware store.
Most windows can be insulated using water-based insulation from a tube, but if the window is a large dining room window or an enormous floor-to-ceiling pair of sliding doors, then you might want to apply the caulking with a caulking gun.
2. Use a can of spray insulation to seal areas of your home that might have little nooks and crannies that leak air to the outside. Areas that usually need treatment are the attic, wet-rooms, porches, and basements. Treating the door that leads to your garage with foam insulation can also help your home hold heat.
3. Run a humidifier for an hour or two a day to keep the air moist, because moist air holds heat for longer.
If you do not want to risk running up your bill by running a dehumidifier, you can also use plants to keep the air humid and moist.
Keep a lot of plants, especially big tropical plants with a broad leafy surface in your place to both purify and humidify the air.
4. Whenever you are finished using the oven, leave the door open and don’t turn on the overhead exhaust. The heat left over from baking will then escape from the oven and further warm up the room.
5. Turn your ceiling fan on low and run it in a counterclockwise direction. This encourages warm air that has naturally risen to your ceiling to drift back downwards towards the floor. As your air is always warm, this prevents you from having to turn up the thermostat too much during a cold snap.
Another bonus to having a well-insulated home is that it keeps the heat out when you turn on your air-conditioning in the summer. Of course, you can augment this effect by having your ceiling fan run in reverse counter-clockwise on fast speed to bring the chilled air produced by the air conditioning downwards.
This is a bonus for Greensburg, PA residents who have been experiencing sizzling hot weather the past few summers due to extreme climate change and who do not want to pay incredibly high electricity bills for running their air conditioning.
If you do not feel that you are the best inspector for your HVAC system, then hire a licensed professional to look for cracks, leaks, fuel problems and other common problems. This will prevent you from having to deal with a major emergency, such as a broken furnace or clogged air duct in the middle of the winter.
