Just when you think you’re about to get ahead and have a chance to save some money, the winter comes. When the winter comes, so do the cold temperatures; trying to keep your house comfortable in the winter becomes a drain on your wallet every year. As your energy bill rises, you see your hopes of saving extra money starting to dwindle. This doesn’t have to be the case; you simply need to understand what causes you to lose money when the winter comes. Once you’ve figured that out, you can start to save a little extra by being smart. In fact, the solutions aren’t even that complicated.
Windows
Windows are what are called thermal bridges; that means that they allow cold temperatures into your house. This is pretty obvious if you’ve ever touched a windowpane on a cold day. No matter how warm your house is, the windows remain cold. That’s because the glass cannot retain any kind of actual heat of its own. So, you should adjust for this inability in a few ways.
First, you need to reduce the amount of contact the glass is having with air inside each room. You should look into getting drapes or curtains; the thicker the material is, the better it will insulate. A thick curtain will work to hold in some of the heat that the window glass can’t.
If you’re remodelling or replacing your windows, you should look into double-glazed windows that have a vacuum in between the panes. The vacuum resists heat transfer and helps to insulate as well. If you’re not remodelling though, curtains are probably the most cost-effective choice.
Heaters
It would be somewhat silly to have televisions on in every room if you were only sitting in one room, wouldn’t it? Well, it’s also a little bit silly to have a central heating system that pumps heat into every room indiscriminately. Radiators will allow you to control which rooms are connected to the furnace pumping heat and how much heat each room is receiving; that way, you can keep your costs to a minimum by only heating the rooms in which you regularly spend time. However, not all radiators are created equal.
Column radiators create layers of heat that radiate throughout a room in all directions, or they can be directed a certain way. That means you can focus the heat, or you can just allow it to raise the ambient temperature; that all depends on the size and shape of the columns. Also, these radiators can be elevated off the ground, which is good because heat rises. So, the floor is always going to be a little bit colder than the rest of the room. If that bothers you, you can put the radiator close to the ground. If you’re trying to save some money, you can lift the radiator up off the ground and not bother with the futile effort of heating up the floor. You might be a little uncomfortable when you get out of bed, but your wallet will thank you.