Reducing your everyday energy usage in the home sounds like a great idea, and we’re pretty sure everyone wants to do it, but sometimes even the best intentions aren’t that easy to follow through on.
In the interests of helping you make a meaningful start on using less energy this winter than last year, we’ve compiled this list of seven simple things you can do in next to no time and with minimal effort or financial outlay that will reduce your energy consumption and your bills.
Even if you’ve heard of these before, and even if you’ve already done one or two if you can commit to implementing all seven, the cumulative reduction will be noticeable when you get your June or July bill … and every winter bill thereafter.
1. Clean your heater
When we have something that works – that is, it’s functioning and not broken – we tend to assume that it’s working well, close to its optimal performance. That’s often a mistaken assumption. The fridge does need regular defrosting, and your car does need servicing.
In the case of your heater, whatever type it is, the accumulation of dust and other grittier airborne particles is inevitable. Some will be on the surface, but a lot more will be trapped by the filters and coating the interior.
So, to ensure your heater runs efficiently, give it a thorough clean before the start of winter. That includes making sure all the ducts of your ducted system are clean and clear of obstructions.
And, pre-empting number 2 (below), consider closing the ducts in rooms that don’t need to be heated all the time.
2. Heat only where you need to
This might take some changing of long-standing habits but imagine if you were heating perhaps half the space that you have heated in the past. That would instantly (and with hardly any effort) cut your heating bills by quite a lot.
Any rooms that you’re not in very often don’t need to be heated just in case you go in there for a few minutes, so shut off the central heating ducts and close the internal doors so you’re not wasting valuable warm air heating an empty space.
Even bedrooms don’t need to be heated if all you’re doing in them is going to bed. You can warm up the bed with an electric blanket (and don’t have that on any longer than you need to), use winter sheets, wear warm pyjamas (you can put them in the bed with the electric blanket on to warm them up before you put them on) and bed socks, and if you’re worried about your head being cold, invest in a nightcap!
3. Make the most of how hot you are!
Warming the air in your home is only part of the equation to keeping yourself and your family comfortable in the colder weather. Just like when you go outside when it’s cold, the less skin you have exposed to the air, the less body heat you’re losing.
Appropriate indoor clothes for winter should include fleecy tops, tracksuit pants, warm socks, and Ugg boots (or similar – we can lose a lot of body heat from our extremities). You might not need layers like you do outside, but wearing soft, comfortable, warm clothing will mean that you won’t feel the need to crank up the heating.
At the same time, there’s nothing wrong with sitting with a rug over you trapping your body heat to keep you even cosier. There’s a good reason that the Oodie wearable blanket has become so popular.
4. Protect your valuable warm air by keeping it from windows
When it’s cold and miserable, especially at night, you need to have a buffer between that chilly air outside and the air inside your house that you’ve paid to heat. Otherwise, you’re paying more to rewarm air cooled by meeting the outside temperature.
Panes of glass are terrible buffers. They effectively become a conductor of cold, transferring the outside air temperature to the inside air that comes into contact with them.
That’s why you need some floor-length thermal curtains to trap the cold right there at the window. A wall of cold glass is replaced by a wall of much-less-cold material that not only keeps the cold on the other side but stops the air you’ve paid to warm from interacting with that cold air, thereby losing some of it’s warmth.
Heavier curtains throughout the house will save quite a bit on that heating you’ve been wasting warming up the windows and fighting the influence of the cold air.
5. Tap into the original solar energy source
Even in winter, the sun’s rays hit us with a decent dose of warmth, so take full advantage of any windows that face the sun when it’s shining and maximise that free natural warmth.
Keep in mind that if you can lift the inside temperature by even a degree or two, that’s a bit less energy you’ll need to “spend” in the evening when the sun’s gone and you want to heat your room to a comfortable nighttime temperature.
If you’ve done number 4 (above) and hung some great curtains to keep the cold air at the window and the warm air inside the room, you’ll need to get into the habit of going around and opening the curtains in the morning on sunny days to let Mother Nature do her thing through those still practical windows!
The other thing you might want to use the winter sun for is drying clothes. While it might not be practical to hang clothes on an outside clothesline on some winter days, setting up a clotheshorse/airer/drying rack right next to a window in a spot that gets a good few hours of sun can be quite effective.
6. Make your thermostat do its job
The point of having a thermostat is that you can set the indoor temperature to a consistent, comfortable level when you’re at home and awake, and to a lower level when you’re out or asleep.
Remember, though, that the idea isn’t to make the house all warm and toasty, so you can pretend it’s summer inside while it’s winter outside. It’s also a real waste of energy to keep it at the same top temperature when you’re not there. On the other hand, you don’t want to let the place get fully chilly by turning the heating off altogether, so it then has to work extra hard to re-warm all that cold air.
The optimal top setting is between 18 and 20 degrees. Every degree above that adds around 10 per cent to your heating costs over time. The experts recommend stepping it back down to around 15 degrees when you go out and while you’re sleeping.
Ideally, you would set the timer to start turning up the heat only around 10 minutes before you get out of bed in the morning and, if possible, about the same length of time before the first person in the household gets back in the afternoon or evening.
Similarly, you don’t have to wait until you are walking out the door or going to bed to switch to the lower setting. You can do that 20 to 30 minutes before you leave for the day and before you go to bed without noticing any impact on the temperature.
And if you’re able to implement number 5 (above) for at least some of the time on some days, the thermostat will reward you by recognising that the heater doesn’t need to be on for as long as on other days that are all grey and overcast or rainy.
7. Seal air leaks
While this can take a little bit of time and effort – and a trip or two to the hardware store – the savings will be significant because nothing steals your indoor warmth more than the sneaky infiltration of cold air from outside.
You might be surprised to realise how many candidates there are for letting the cold air leak in during winter. Just having a good look around can often reveal some obvious gaps to seal.
To check how well your windows and doors shut out the cold, just take a note out of your purse or wallet (does anyone still carry cash money?) and shut the door or window on it. Then if it slips back out without much drag, you’re losing energy through that gap.
As well as checking around window and door frames, check out:
– fireplaces and chimneys
– attic hatches
– wall- or window-mounted air conditioners
– where dryer vents pass through walls
– vents and fans
– cable TV and phone lines
– electrical and gas service entrances
– electrical outlets and switch plates
– pipes (for example under the sink).
If you can seal all the gaps to keep the cold air out and the warm air in, your heating won’t have to work as hard to keep your rooms at the temperature you’ve set.
As we said at the outset, if you can put all seven of these tips into practice, you’ll see a significant drop in your winter energy use from now on.
If the outside temperature is in single digits every night throughout the winter months and you’re enduring many days where the top temperature is only in the low-to-mid teens, making these relatively small changes will probably save you hundreds of dollars a year.
And that’s nothing to sneeze at (bless you)!