Did you know that, according to The Conversation, heating comprises over 70% of household energy consumption? Hence, the way you home is an easy target when you are trying to figure out how you could trim your household’s financial expenditure.
Fortunately, there is more room for maneuver than you may have long thought when it comes to how much money you need to spend on heating your residence – as the following budget-conscious tips attest.
Open and Close your Curtains at the Right times
Obviously, heat from the sun is free – but, not so obvious, you could have inadvertently fallen into the habit of leaving certain curtains in your home drawn even during the day.
Perhaps there’s a spare bedroom that you rarely enter even for sleeping in, let alone opening its curtains. Whatever your reasons for ignoring your curtains, though, you should now make sure they are left open when the sun is shining and kept closed during the dark hours when those curtains can serve as an extra layer of insulation.
Be Careful Where you Position your Sofa
Great though it can feel to have your sofa in front of a radiator, you would be largely putting that radiator to waste – as the sofa would be absorbing heat you could instead allow roaming free through your home.
So, try to find a new place for your sofa – and check that other items, like curtains or drying clothes, aren’t blocking the radiator and consequently blunting its heat-producing powers.
Add Extra Insulation to your Loft
Here is another eye-opening statistic: about 25% of a home’s heat is lost through its roof. However, you can help to counter this effect by installing 25cm of insulation around your attic space.
Loft insulation also has the benefit of being cheaper to install than cavity wall insulation – though you should probably look into getting that, too, if your budget would stretch to it.
Install Raised Loft Boarding
So, you have insulated your loft, but you might not have realized that you can even further plug heat leakage by having raised loft boarding installed.
Raised loft boarding is so-called as, unlike standard loft boarding, it would not squash your loft insulation or require you to remove any to the obvious detriment of your home’s warmth.
One easy-to-recommend example of raised loft boarding installation is the award-winning loft boarding service from Instaloft, a company ready to serve many households in various parts of the UK.
Reduce how often you use your fireplace
Sounds counterproductive, right? Yes, until you consider that, for every hour you have a fire roaring in your fireplace, over 20,000 cubic feet of heated air escapes your home, as This Old House warns.
So, while you might feel warm by the fire, it’s actually leading your house to lose a lot of its warmth elsewhere – with cold air coming in to replace it. Therefore, you should probably just reserve a blazing fireplace for special occasions – and close your chimney’s flue when you won’t be using the fireplace.
