Effective Ways to Keep Your Home Warm in Freezing Weather

When it’s freezing outside, the last thing any of us want to do is come home to a house that is chilly too. Yet depending on the temperature outdoors and how tight our budget is, sometimes it can be a bit of a challenge figuring out how to stay nice and toasty without spending our entire paycheck in the process.

Luckily, there are some effective ways to keep warm in bitterly cold weather; ways that can still keep some dollars in your pocket. If you’d like to know what some of them are, we’re provided you with five things below:

Add more insulation. If you can’t remember the last time that you went up into your attic for the purpose of checking your insulation, before the winter season would be an ideal time to do it. That’s because the insulation that’s up in your attic is what helps to protect the rooms in your house from the extreme temperatures outside. According to most energy experts, your house is well-protected if the insulation is approximately 12″ thick and is made out of an eco-friendly material like sheep’s wool, cotton or even aerogel.

Pad your pipes. Speaking of insulation, something else that you want to avoid is having your pipes freeze due to the cold weather. That’s because freezing pipes prevent you from being able to take hot baths or showers after a long day. The good news is that padding your pipes is fairly easy to do. All you need is some fiberglass or foam. For tips on how to insulate your pipes yourself, visit DIY Network and put “how to insulate pipes” in the search field.

Change your window treatments. Another place that cold air tries to get in is through our windows. But, if you put up some thermal curtains, that should block a lot of it (especially if you already have double-pane windows). Thermal material is made to keep your home warmer. You can go to a store like Target or Walmart to pick some of these curtains up.

Turn on your ceiling fans. Initially, it might seem a bit odd that we would recommend that you turn on your ceiling fan(s) during the winter season, but it can actually help to pull the heat that has risen to your ceiling down closer to where you are. You can do this by setting them to rotate in a counterclockwise position. That can make the rooms in your house between 5-7 degrees warmer.

Get your HVAC unit or furnace professionally serviced. If you were online reading an article about the reasons why your air conditioner may freeze up , something that it might mention is that when you fail to get your HVAC unit serviced on an annual basis, it can result in your unit malfunctioning. This also applies to your furnace too. In fact, we actually recommend that you get your unit check out by a licensed technician in the spring (in preparation for the summer) and in the fall (in preparation for the winter). That way you can be confident that it will be working well, and keeping you warm, all winter long.