Cut Your Winter Energy Bills With Fixes That Work
There is a lot of advice about saving energy, and a good deal of it assumes you own the place, have a few thousand pounds spare, and enjoy loft work.
This is the other list. The things that make a real difference to how warm a home feels, cost very little, and work whether you own it or rent it.
Why does a warm house still feel cold?
Usually because it is moving air, not because the heating is failing.
A draught takes heat away from your skin much faster than still air at the same temperature. That is why a room can be twenty degrees on the thermostat and still feel unpleasant if there is a steady trickle of cold air across the floor. Chasing draughts is almost always cheaper and more effective than turning the heating up.
Where is the cold actually getting in?
Go and find out properly rather than guessing.
On a cold, windy day, walk the house slowly with the back of a wet hand held out. You will feel air movement your skin would otherwise ignore. Do it at floor level, around doors and windows, at the letterbox, and at the edges of any room above an unheated space.
Letterboxes and keyholes, which most people never think about.
The gap under an external door, and the gap under an internal door to a cold hallway.
Floorboard gaps and skirting edges in older houses.
Unused chimneys, which can pull warm air out of a room all day.
Loft hatches, which are often a bare board sitting on a frame.
Cat flaps, extractor vents and old cable entry points.
What is worth doing first?
The cheap, reversible things, in this order.
Draught proof the front door. A brush strip along the bottom and a letterbox brush take twenty minutes and change the whole hallway.
Line the curtains, or just hang thicker ones, and make sure they finish above a radiator rather than covering it. A curtain over a radiator sends most of its heat straight out of the window.
Block an unused chimney with a proper inflatable balloon or a chimney sheep, not a bin bag. Leave a small amount of ventilation.
Put a reflective panel behind radiators on external walls. It is a few pounds and it stops warming the brickwork.
Close the doors. Heating rooms you are not in is the most common and most expensive habit in a cold house.
Bleed the radiators. A radiator cold at the top and warm at the bottom is holding air and doing half its job.
What about the thermostat and the timer?
Use the timer properly and stop fighting the thermostat.
Turning the thermostat up does not heat the house faster. It heats it to a higher final temperature, which usually means overshooting and opening a window two hours later. Set it to a temperature you are comfortable at and let the timer bring the heating on before you need it rather than after.
If you have thermostatic valves on the radiators, use them. Turning down the ones in rooms nobody uses is the closest thing to free money in this article.
What if you rent and cannot change anything?
Almost everything above is yours to do.
Draught excluders, curtains, radiator panels, chimney balloons, door brushes and bleeding a radiator are all reversible and none of them alter the property. Take them with you when you go.
What is not yours to fix is the building. Broken heating, failing windows, missing insulation and persistent damp are the landlord's, and those are worth reporting in writing rather than quietly buying another blanket.
What about the rooms that are always coldest?
There is usually a reason, and it is usually structural rather than mysterious.
A room over a garage or a passageway has cold air underneath it rather than a heated room, so the floor never warms up. A room on the corner of the building has two external walls instead of one. A bedroom above an unheated porch behaves the same way. In all three cases the heating is working perfectly well and the room is simply losing heat faster than the others.
Rugs help more than people expect on a cold floor, because they stop the surface stealing heat from your feet. A thicker curtain and a draught excluder at the door will usually do more for that room than turning the whole house up by a degree.
What is not worth your money?
Anything sold as a miracle in November.
Be wary of small electric heaters marketed as cheaper than central heating. Electricity generally costs considerably more per unit than gas, so heating a whole house that way rarely saves anything. Heating one small room you are actually sitting in can make sense. Heating the house room by room with plug-in heaters usually does not.
Frequently asked questions
Is it cheaper to leave the heating on low all day?
For most homes, no. Heating the house when nobody is in it costs more than reheating it when they get back. The exception is a very well insulated home, or a property with persistent damp where a low steady background temperature helps keep surfaces above dew point.
Do I have to leave windows open in winter?
Not permanently, but a home needs some ventilation or moisture builds up and turns into condensation and mould. Short bursts work best. Open windows wide for a few minutes after showering, cooking or drying washing, then close them.
Will draught proofing cause damp?
It can if you seal a house completely and remove all ventilation. Draught proof the uncontrolled gaps, and keep the deliberate ventilation: extractor fans, trickle vents and airbricks. Never block an airbrick.
If this would help someone dreading their next energy bill, please share it with them.
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