This time of year is the perfect time to be thinking about saving money on your heating bills next Winter!
That sounds odd I know but if you’re anything like us, you’re using your heating less and less now that Spring has arrived and I’m sure that in a couple of weeks we’ll barely have it on again until the cold weather kicks in again later in the year.
If you identify areas where you can cut costs now then you’ve got plenty of time to get them all done before the cold weather does start because believe me, you’ll be a lot less inclined to take action in the cold dark Winter months than you will be in the nice bright days that we’re seeing now.
So, how can you cut the costs of your heating bill? Well, the first thing you can do is the most important and that’s to identify any areas where you’re losing heat.
Identifying where your house is losing heat sounds like a slightly impossible task as you can’t see heat loss usually but the team from Everest sent us a brilliant Flir One thermal imaging camera to help us identify where our house was losing heat. You can buy your own from Amazon Flir One if you want to have a go yourself.
I wasn’t expecting it to show much heat loss from our house to be honest as it’s a new build which is quite energy efficient generally but I was surprised by some of the results….
This is our front door from the inside….
And from the outside….
I knew there was a draft at the bottom and always have a draft excluder there in the Winter but it’s clearly not just the bottom of the door that has an issue! It’s a wooden door and I think it may be time to upgrade to a UPVC one because I know that will be more efficient.
Here’s our living room window, with the curtains open….
And again with them shut….
You can see the different that just closing the curtains makes can’t you? This is a surprise for me as I often don’t close the curtains on a night as we have blinds up too – I’ll definitely be closing them in future though.
You can see a similar thing here with our patio doors….
The photo shows the blinds half open as they often are with the dog wanting to be in and out all the time but you can see the different that makes can’t you? Even with the blind closed, there’s still noticeable heat loss at the bottom of the door so I need to consider curtains for there I think as we don’t currently have them.
So, I know that over the next few months, I need to do something with my front door and get some thick curtains up at the kitchen windows. Then when Winter comes around and I’ve got the heating on again, I can close the curtains earlier evening and keep as much heat in as I can.
We’re lucky with our house now as there were no major areas that I need to sort but I was a little surprised at the heat loss through the windows as I thought we were as energy efficient as we could be. This video from Everest about the benefits of triple glazing was very interesting and certainly something to consider….
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