We don’t think much of it until the first bill or two – but heating the house can be expensive. But it doesn’t have to be as costly as the bill for December was. There are lots of changes you can make to cut the cost of keeping your family warm over the next few months.
Here are 5 easy fixes to consider for improved home comfort and decreased costs through the winter:
If nobody is staying in the spare bedroom, why spend the money keeping it warm?
Take inventory of how often you use each room in your home. Block the vents and close the doors in any rooms you use irregularly. When you need those rooms it won’t take long open the vents and warm them up.
If you have a mud room bridging the gap between the garage and the rest of the house, experiment by blocking the heat in there. See if it makes a difference in your bills. You might be surprised by how much just 1 small room can change your expenses.
15 degrees Celsius feels different in the desert than in the jungle. This is the power of humidity! Humid air feels warmer, even when it isn’t
Pair your furnace with a whole house humidifier (or buy some smaller humidifiers and run them in individual rooms), and you can set the thermostat a few degrees cooler than you have it set right now.
Humid air also reduces annoying winter happenings like nosebleeds and static electricity shocks. And humid air actually reduces incidents of seasonal colds and flu.
If you spend most of your time in just three or four rooms in the house you could experiment with more localized heating options.
You have a wood burning stove on your main floor? Keep a small fire going and plug in 1 or 2 small space heaters at opposing ends of the floor. You might even be able to turn the furnace off entirely.
Ceiling fans have two settings: one for the summer, one for winter. In the winter your fan should spin clockwise at a low speed to keep the warm air circulating without creating the cooling breeze it would in the other direction.
A furnace struggling to pump out warm air because of a clogged filter or some more complicated issue will not run like the finely tuned machine it is. Without maintenance it becomes less and less finely tuned.
Something as simple as a clogged filter, for example, nearly doubles the work your furnace puts into warming the house. So a quick filter replacement, part of routine maintenance, can save you hundreds of dollars through the winter.
The water heater you currently have at home probably exerts energy all day and night - when you're at work, asleep, watching a movie, cooking dinner - to maintain a tank full of hot water. This contributes a significant chunk of your energy bill.
You have 2 ways to cut back on water heating.
A John Wood water tank will help stretch the heat you put into your water longer, so the water doesn’t have to be reheated as often. A tankless water heater never heats more than you actually need in the moment, so you never pay for more than you need.
Either way, if your water tank is more than 5 years old, you’re probably wasting money each month.
Looking for more ways to save money over the long term? Contact a member of our team today.
