Cheap Ways to Heat Your Home in Winter

Many people find the winter months a difficult time. The cost of heating your home can add up especially during some of the coldest and bitterest winter months. In this article, we’re going to take a look at some simple and cheap ways to help you heat your home in winter.

Before diving into the detail, lets divide the topic into two manageable sections. First, we will look at ways to prevent heat loss in your home. Secondly we will examine some of the best ways to generate heat without breaking your budget.

Preventing heat loss

Roof insulation

Have you ever looked at a row of houses that are covered in snow? If you ever see one that has no snow on it next to one that has the snow piled high you will know that you are looking at a home that has little or no roof insulation.

Can you imagine how much heat is required to keep that roof free of snow? If you can, then you understand how important it is to insulate your roof.

Roof insulation can be done in a number of different ways, ranging from quite expensive to very cheap. At the cheaper end of the market, you can easily find suppliers of rolled up woolly attic insulation. This wool can range from natural wool to recycled plastic fibres.

The important thing is that it is both readily available and inexpensive. If you do not have insulation in your attic then you should attend to this as soon as possible, and certainly before the winter months kick in.

Seal household draughts

A major source of heat loss in most homes is down to warm air escaping through windows and doors and other sources of draughts.

In addressing the issue of heating your home in winter, you simply cannot overlook the need to ensure that you seal up as many causes of draughts as possible.

Fortunately, most of us know exactly where the warm air escapes in our homes. If not there are easy ways to find out where your money is going. As a guide, make sure that you examine the gaps beneath doors, poorly fitting door fittings and keyholes, ventilation bricks, weather strips and chimneys.

Dealing with most of these issues is relatively straightforward and should certainly not cost very much money. There are many different options for preventing draughts underneath doors the simplest and most obvious being a fabric draft excluder laid down to block up any gaps. Replacing windows strips is straightforward, with the relevant materials being readily available at most hardware stores. And, it is relatively easy to find a way to insert something into a chimney to prevent warm air flowing literally into the heavens.

Thermal Drapes and Temporary Double Glazing

Windows are another culprit when it comes to losing heat from your home. Heat can be lost through a conduction process whereby the warm air inside the home is conducted by the window itself or the window frame to the outside.

One potential option, is to cover the windows with inexpensive thermal boards which should deal with most of the issues. However this would also have the effect of blocking out the light, and should only be considered really in rooms that you are not using much.

An alternative, is to use temporary double glazing. This temporary double glazing can be purchased from almost all hardware stores, and is effectively easy to install. Essentially, the double glazing is plastic sheets which are attached to the frame of your window and then stretched by warming gently with a hairdryer to make a transparent plastic barrier.

Another good option to limit heat loss via your windows is to use a thermal drape. Thermal material can be expensive. However, it is well worth it if you can afford it. If you cannot however, it is easy to purchase some relatively inexpensive heavy material, such as velvet or equivalent, from which you can make simple window drapes that should prevent much of the heat loss, especially in the evening.

Wrap up Warm

One should never overlook the option of simply wearing warmer clothes or more layers when at home, which is not so much a way of heating your home, but sidestepping the need to heat at all. Woolly sweaters, thermal tops and bottoms, and wearing slippers around the house are all easy ways to keep you warm and delay the point at which you start to think about turning on the heat.

Heating Your Home Cheaply

Ensure Your Heating is Working

If you do use your home furnace to heat your home, then it is clearly sensible to make sure that it is functioning properly and efficiently. When thinking about the need to heat your home cheaply this step is often overlooked. However, a poorly maintained home furnace means that you will spend money generating heat but not benefiting from it.

Simple steps to take to make sure that all events are clear and that the warm air circulates freely throughout your home. This will not need a professional to get involved as you will know all the access points yourself.

However, you should still not overlooked a regular service of your home furnace to make sure that the furnaces burning efficiently and effectively. This will almost certainly require the assistance of a professional as there are obvious safety issues in dealing with your furnace that you may not be comfortable with.

Portable Space Heaters

Another effective way of minimising costs, is to sensibly use portable space heaters to generate heat. It is generally accepted that the cost of creating heat using portable space heaters is higher than the cost of using your home furnace. However, the reality is that it can be significantly cheaper to heat small spaces with a portable space heater, than by turning on the home furnace for the whole home.

In effect, you are attempting to create heating zones in your home without having to go to the expense of an intelligent thermostat controlling your home heating.

As a working approach, when using portable space heaters it is most sensible to consider heating you, and not necessarily the room. Space heaters these days are very inexpensive, can be extremely small and portable, while generating more than sufficient heat to keep you warm.

Ceramic space heaters are particularly good at providing personal heating, they are safe to use, are naturally self-regulating and very inexpensive to purchase. There are a number of brands of ceramic space heater and we have looked at the best ceramic space heaters elsewhere on this site.

Ceramic space heaters are not the only option however, infrared heaters are also very effective and very affordable. If you are interested in the most energy efficient heaters, we have looked in detail at this subject too.

Summing Up

In conclusion, we hope that we have provided some useful information within this article. In essence, the best advice is to ensure firstly that you do not lose any heat unnecessarily from your home, and the second piece of advice is to make sure that any heat that you do generate is both energy efficient and targeted at heating only what is necessary to heat.

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