It’s important to ensure the comfort of your family, and one of the main components of a cozy home is warmth. You may have found that you pay a lot more in a bid to keep your home warm and toasty in cold seasons and are eager to change this. Read on to see how you can get the extra warmth without significantly increasing your heating bills.
Minimize Use of Your Fireplace
While sitting by a warm fireplace is warm and nice, you can lose a lot of the air you heated through the chimney. To ensure there’s a lower chance of this happening, keep the number of times you use the fireplace to a minimum. Whenever there’s no fire going, keep the flue closed so there are no drafts of cold air getting drawn into your home. Alternatively, install glass fireplace doors that will prevent heated air in the living room from being sucked outside and replaced with cold air when you go to bed. With households that use heating oil set to spend 43% more than they did last winter, or $1,734 this winter, it’s important to ensure you minimize your heating whichever method you use.
Get a Programmable Thermostat
A programmable thermostat can make a world of a difference as far as keeping your home warm enough goes. You will be able to set the temperatures you want for different times of the day and also monitor and adjust the temperature while outside of the home as a plus. This will save you from having to heat the house when no one is indoors but have it warm enough when you start to get back home. In a short time, you will realize good savings, and all from something that’s easy enough to do in an afternoon by yourself.
Use Your Drapes
Most conventional draperies, when drawn during cold weather, can reduce the amount of heat lost from a warm room by 10%. With this in mind, you can keep your home warm in the winter by ensuring you open your drapes during the day and then close them just before sunset, especially if they’re heavy. Doing this will keep the house warmer and ensure that you need to use less energy to get the temperature to a comfortable level for your family.
Seal the Doors and Windows
Your doors and windows may inadvertently be leaking warmth to the outdoors through tiny cracks and gaps. To stop this heat loss in its tracks, you need to ensure that your doors and windows are sealed tight. Check for any cracks and fill them with caulk, which can easily be bought at a local hardware store. For an even easier job, you can get press-in-place rope caulk that is easy and mess-free to install. As a plus, it will also be easy to remove when the season gets warmer so you can put a more permanent solution in place.
Install Wood Flooring
Finally, the floor you have in your home can make a big difference as far as keeping the home warm goes. With 78% of people feeling a major sense of accomplishment whenever they think of their new wood flooring installation and 67% experiencing more sense of enjoyment when they’re at home, it’s clear that a wooden floor is a good investment. As it will also help you to increase your home’s value, you will get great returns all-around from getting wooden floors for your home’s common spaces.
Use the tips above to ensure that you keep your home warm in the cold season without having to fork out more money and you will be glad you did so.
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