With the cold weather set to continue for the next few months, it’s important to know how to keep your house warm when the temperatures drop.
Here are five simple ways to keep your house warm in winter without racking up extra costs.
1. Seal drafts
Even the smallest draft can cause the temperature inside your house to drop drastically when the weather is cold. The most common places for drafts to enter your house are underneath doors and around windows including between window panes and the frame. If you feel cold air seeping beneath a door leading outside and find that using a door snake, towel or blanket is inconvenient, install a draft-defeating nylon door sweep. This long, thin broom-like vinyl-and-pile attachment gets installed along the inside bottom edge of the door. For windows, install weatherstripping to seal gaps along the edges of window panes and ensure windows are closed tight and locked.
2. Move furniture away from vents, registers and radiators
It might seem like the best way to arrange your living room, but if the couch is right in front of the radiator, or is blocking a vent it is really an inefficient way of heating the room. Keeping radiators, vents and registers free of obstructions, such as beds or chairs is the best way to ensure the heat dissipates as much as possible and keeps the house warm. Blocking the flow of heat into a room wastes money and leads to cold rooms. With a forced-air system, blocking a supply or return vent can cause a house-wide pressure imbalance that disrupts the heat flow in the whole system.
3. Curtains, blinds and shutters, open in the day and close in the evening
This is great measure to heat your home. Sunlight is a helpful and free way to keep your house warm during the day, but, as soon as the sun goes down it’s a good idea to close your blinds, shutters or curtains to stop heat from escaping. This encourages the warm air to stay in your home.
4. Lay a rug down
Tiled floors and uninsulated floorboards can make a room really cold, and you will definitely feel the cold when you enter those rooms. A simple solution, lay an area rug on the floor during the winter season. This will act as a heat trap and absorb the coldness from the floor.
5. Close doors to rooms you’re not using
Close doors to unused rooms to lessen the amount of space in your home to heat, allowing warmer air to stay in the rooms you are using. Some homes have one room that’s always colder than the rest, no matter what? If you’re not using that room, make sure you close it off so it doesn’t absorb valuable heat from the rest of the house. If you do that, make sure to turn off any radiators and close any vents in there to make sure you don’t waste energy.
THE 905 REAL ESTATE GUYS
info@905realestateguys.com
Sean Kavanagh 905.220.9198
Leo Manchisi 905.334.9650