The first step you can take in being more efficient with your heating this winter is to make your home as snug as you can. You can do this by checking how well your windows and doors fit into their frames, making repairs,, or, if necessary, replacing with better units.
Put thick rugs down in the winter and replace your photos with quilts and draperies on the wall. The additional material acts as insulation and helps to contain the heat that is produced by your heating unit.
Keep your heating unit (whatever it is) in good repair. Clean and maintain it regularly. I can’t give specific tips on all the different things to do in this space, but if you do a little searching you can find many instructional articles on keeping your units in their best possible condition.
Besides those basics, consider investing in a way to supplement your electric or gas-powered heating system. If your home is small enough, you might be able to switch entirely; even if you still need a little “help,” having an additional, more efficient source of heat allows you to use your central heat unit less.
Other options to supplement/replace gas or electric heat:
- I’d never heard of this before, but it sounds like a good alternative: the wood-pellet stove have, according to the article referenced, an 80 to 85% efficiency rate. They burn on sawdust pellets, release hardly any smoke, and the pellets themselves come from the waste of lumberyards. Not a bad idea. Not perfect, either, as is pointed out: it is powered by electricity, so it won’t do you much good when an ice storm knocks out your power lines.
- A wood-burning fireplace or stove. Okay, I admit, a wood-burning fireplace is rather notoriously inefficient. I love having a fire, though, so I’ve done my research. If you want to have a fireplace that is more efficient, read this article and implement the advice. Or you could consider converting that fireplace to a wood-burning stove. However, as is pointed out in this article, both fireplaces and wood-burning stoves can produce quite a lot of pollutants. So, as the article suggests, buy a wood stove that combusts the wood as completely as possible and be sure it is installed correctly.
- Consider a corn-burning stove. I love this. It just smacks of the good old American ingenuity we claim to have. And it’s clean, efficient, economical, and uses a renewable resource for fuel. I first heard of these from my midwife, who heats her home with corn-burning stove. I said, “A what-burning stove?” She explained. Since then, I’ve found quite a lot of information. The cheapest one I found was around $1000, and they go up from there. A good amount, but not bad if it can eliminate those high-dollar heating bills all winter.
Image Credit: Mike Pedroncelli.
I remember when I was a kid and went to visit family in the middle east, they had a stove in the middle on the room where they burned wood. That’s also where they cooked and it heat up the place where everybody sat.
It’s funny how the old ideas are coming back as all new! Maybe our ancestors knew something we didn’t.
Also consider making window snakes to cut down on breezes. And if you hang blankets over doorways, it will cut down on drafts, too!
I like some of these ideas… the thick rugs one won’t work for us, though… we have radiant heat and since it comes through the floor, thick rugs would do the opposite of helping.