Cost Effective Ways To Keep Your Home Warm This Winter. It’s at this time of year that traditionally, we all turn our heating systems on. This year, possibly more than most, keeping your home warm in the most economical way is on all our minds. We use energy every day at home, from charging a phone to cooking dinner, unsurprisingly a lot of this energy is used for heating. The emissions from heating systems account for significant amounts of CO2 released into the environment. We can all do our bit to minimise wasting the planets valuable resources, and stay warm doing so.
Making the best use of whatever heat our homes heating system provides will help keep energy bills as low as they can be. Here are some cost effective ways to keep your home warm this winter.
Preparing Your Home
One thing you need to consider is how to make your home ready – one of these is to make sure that your boiler is ready for winter. Having your boiler serviced every few years is generally a good idea. However, if the worst happens and your boiler does break then using someone reliable for your boiler repairs is recommended. BBright are a great choice for this because they have a network of trusted engineers; which means that you can feel safe and confident in them carrying out the boiler work in your home.
Whether you need a boiler fixing, checking or replacing it is great to have peace of mind that the engineer visiting your home has been checked and certified, which is exactly what BBright offer.
Keep Your Home Warm – A Heating Strategy
How you use your heating system will have a big effect on running costs. If your heating is on a timer, setting it to turn on 30 minutes before you get up in the morning, but off well before you leave the house will keep bills under control while not heating a house that you’ve already left for the day. Leaving your heating on during the day is wasteful, overall it uses less energy to reheat your home in the evening than leaving the system on low during the day.
Keep Your Home Warm – Curtains
Large heat losses occur with the windows and doors of our homes, realistically even efficient double or triple glazing still lets much more heat escape than the walls surrounding them. Making sure curtains are well-fitting helps, choosing curtains with a thermal lining that helps to retain heat is a good idea. Keeping them open during daylight and closed at night will let the natural light and heat in during the day, but help retain heat at night.
Keep Your Home Warm – Room Layout
If your home has radiators mounted on the walls, try and avoid placing furniture directly in front of the radiators. If you have to, try and leave as much of a gap as possible. This will help the heat from the radiator to warm the room effectively.
Keep Your Home Warm – Eliminate Draughts
Draughts waste the heat put into your home at an alarming rate. A draughty external door is worth sorting out. Various types of seals for doors and windows are available. Most of these are simple to fit and work well. Traditional draught excluders can be quickly deployed to a home without any need to alter the house. Very useful in rented accommodation where modifications are not permitted.
Keep Your Home Warm – Consider Insulation
Having adequate insulation for your home is really important, once it’s fitted it works to save you money every year. Some parts of the UK may qualify for free insulation, or grants from their local authorities to cover the costs. Even if you need to pay upfront for insulation, overall it’s the best value investment in lower running costs that you can make. Insulation technology has improved in recent years, even homes that were once not easily insulated can be catered for using modern systems.
There’s really no excuse to put up with higher energy bills and emissions instead of insulating your home, certainly one of the most cost-effective ways to keep your home warm this winter.
So, get your boiler checked and ready to go, do what you can to eliminate drafts, use your heating sensibly and ensure that big pieces of furniture are not blocking radiators and you’ll soon be on your way to making your home as warm as possible without spending too much!. If you have any hints for keeping your home warm this winter we’d love you to share them!
*collaborative post
About Debz Louise
Debz Louise is a UK-based lifestyle expert and the founder of several lifestyle blogs, including Wannabe Princess and Under 5s. Specializing in everything from interior design and home renovation to body-positive fashion and early years development,