We recently talked to you about How to Keep Your Utility Bills Under Budget, but we wanted to write a more specific post about preparing your home for winter. Keeping your heating and cooling bills under control are essential to reducing the cost of your overall budget, which is part of a debt free lifestyle. Read our post on How to Prepare Your Home for Summer to Save Money. Check out all of our Spending Freeze posts.
How to Winterize Your Home
- Clean your gutters. This prevents clogged down spouting and water damage. This also prevents ice from freezing on your roof.
- Get a digital thermostat. A digital thermostat is a great way to control the temperature in your home. Ours is easy to program from an app on our phone when we are away from home. Check out our recent post on our Nest Digital Home Thermometer from Best Buy. My husband is now able to control our home thermostat from an app on his phone.
- Insulate, insulate, insulate. Check for air leaks and drafts in your home and make sure to insulate as much as possible to keep cold air from blowing in and out in winter months. It’s so important to make sure that you have plenty of blown insulation (or regular insulation) in your attic, crawl spaces, and other drafty areas. Also, make sure to insulate pipes as well, as this can be a huge place to lose heat in the winter.
- Use bubble wrap to cover your windows. If you apply water to the non-bubble side of the wrap, it should stick to your windows and provide a thick layer of insulation.
- Have your furnace serviced. We learned this one the hard way. Two years ago our furnace stopped working on New Years Eve day (my birthday, of course), because we had gone several years without getting it cleaned and serviced. We learned a very, very expensive lesson. The worker looked like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins when he came up the step. Keeping your furnace clean helps it function more efficiently and saves you money. If you use a wood furnace, make sure it is cleaned as well as any chimneys.
- Replace your furnace filter. This is something we do every other month, and we buy them in bulk at the local big box store so only have to buy them once a year.
- Don’t cover your heating vents. This also means don’t place furniture over them and make sure they are open. We didn’t realize that every time we swept with our Rocket that we were accidentally rolling over the on/off switches for the vents. We would come home and it would be so cold, and finally one day my husband realized that we had been accidentally closing them when we swept each week.
- Put a jacket on your water heater. I’m not talking about a real jacket, but an insulating jacket like this Frost King on Amazon or this Duck Insulation Blanket.
- Cover your door. We have a curtain rod above our side door and at night we shut the curtains across our door since it is all glass, and I don’t like people being able to look in at night. These curtains are thick and heavy and help keep cold air out in the winter. My mom’s best friend mainly uses one room in her house and hangs a thick heavy blanket in front of the door to that room then uses a Kerosene heater to heat that room and keeps the furnace very cool in the rest of the house. However, you must, must be careful with any sort of space heater. I had one catch on fire in my classroom at school last year due to wiring issues, and the kerosene heaters are very dangerous if not supervised properly. Please read about our son’s burn story, and know that it needs to be taken seriously.
- Trim Trees. Examine areas around your home where trees need trimmed. We had an evergreen fall right over in our yard after we first moved in that would have caused massive damage to our home had it been much closer. It’s good to get these trees taken care of before a winter storm hits.
Read more about winterizing your home at energy.gov. What are some of your winterizing tips? Comment them below!
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