You will agree that heating a home is a costly endeavor to venture into during winter. Thankfully, there are several ways you can stay warm without relying on your heater’s warmth. Such practices will help you save a lot of money on heating costs.
Here are the ten impressive ways to keep yourself warm without using your furnace.
1. Seal Any Cracks Available in Your Window Frame
Don’t underestimate the magnitude by which a small crack can reduce the warmth in your house. As the small cracks allow chilly winds in, they significantly will enable a lot of heat to escape.
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Use a flashlight or candle to check for these cracks and holes. You can achieve this by sending someone to the opposite side of your light source and ask them to spot spaces they can see the light coming from. Seal these cracks as perfectly as you can.
2. Have Your Furnace Repaired
You will not completely stop using your furnace in winter. You’ll have to depend on it more but only use it economically.
If you have a faulty furnace, it will consume more energy as it takes longer than usual to warm up your room. To avoid the extra charges, you need to seek the help of furnace repairers in your area.
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For instance, if you live in Missoula, the best repairers to help you fix your furnace are Plumb-Tech in Missoula. They will bring back your furnace to life and help you maintain a warm winter as you work on ways to retain as much of that heat inside your home.
3. Add Insulation to Your Wall
In modern homes, insulation seems to be a standard practice, and you won’t need to worry about that much. However, if you live in one of those old homes, you might need to check your insulation much closer.
Photo by Tobi Fairley
Since warm air rises, the ceiling should be your main point of focus if you want to retain the maximum amount of heat. Insulate the ceiling first, then proceed to the walls for maximum heat retention.
4. Use Your Fan for Your Benefit
While you mostly think your fan is only beneficial during hot, humid days, that’s not true. If you reverse the motor’s direction to rotate in a clockwise direction, the fan creates an updraft. The updraft pushes warm air near the ceiling back down into the room.
Since you need all your tools in play for maximum warmth, this trick will be a plus to keep you warmer for longer. That will help you lower your bill by a significant percentage when you lower your thermostat.
5. Buy Warm Blankets
You need better blankets for winter. Put aside the lighter ones you used during summer and keep warm while you sleep. Warmer blankets help you save on your bill as you won’t need your furnace’s services as you sleep at night.
However, you should remember that blankets only help by trapping heat, which means there must first be heat to trap. In that case, you might need to turn the furnace for a few hours before going to bed. That will warm the room, allowing you to trap heated air.
6. Use Rags on Your Floor
Did you know that heat can escape from your house through floorboards? It happens a lot. To avoid that, you should use rags made of fabric that offers insulation like wool. Such rags help to trap the heat inside, and they feel nice and cozy on your feet.
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7. Use a Programmable Thermostat
A common practice among homeowners is always to lower the thermostat when leaving home and adjusting it when back. However, this technique doesn’t help save electricity.
When you increase the thermostat to maximum, the energy spent to cover for the drastic changes multiplies in the final power consumption.
Generally, you’ll save more energy if you use programmable thermostats. The devices can lower your home’s temperature by a few degrees when you are not home.
8. Rooms You Don’t Use Should Be Under Lock and Key
Rooms that you reserve for guests are not always occupied. With a programmable heater, you can stop heating the room and lock it tight. That will prevent cold air from accessing the whole house through open windows and undrawn curtains. Also, it will save you some extra money from your electricity bill.
9. Get the Outside Walls Clear By Day and Reinforced at Night
With the sun shining during the daytime, you want much of its heat restored in your walls. Drawing back the curtains and obstacles on the outside walls can help more heat into the house and much stored in the walls.
You should move things against the wall at night to create more barriers between you and the cold coming from outside.
10. Dance Your Night Away
You cannot dance every day and long into the night as you need to rest for the next day’s activities. But once in a while, you can shake the cold away by dancing during your nights out.
Moving your body is an excellent way of producing heat, making it self-reliant and independent of external heating apparatus. By dancing, you end up saving on some energy as you keep your body fit.
Final Words
Staying warm, especially in winter, can be challenging if the season catches you unprepared. But with the simple life hacks, you can always get your home warm and cozy even in the coldest of seasons. With additional resourcefulness and a positive spirit, you can always stay warm at home, ready for the next season.
