It’s cold out there so here’s our tips for keeping your house warm this winter. If you spend a lot of time indoors, it’s vital you heat your home and stay warm. Once you start to get cold, it’s much harder to recover. Don’t forget to move around and do some exercise. Hot drinks and hot baths can help too. Have a look at our keeping your house warm checklist for more tips.
Tips For Keeping Your House Warm #1 – Insulation
One of the best things you can do is reduce heat loss from your home. There’s a few ways you can do this, such as lagging your pipes or placing tin foil clad card behind your radiators. This helps reflect heat back into your house which may otherwise be lost to your outside walls. Heat loss through water pipes is easy to avoid with some pipe lagging which is an easy win!
Saving heat loss is one of the best things you can do to save on heating bills and keep your house warm for less.
Tips For Keeping Your House Warm #2 – Draught Proof Your Home
You can also block out draughts under doors with draught excluders. Make sure you close your internal doors to prevent heat loss around the home. Any leaks around doors which let in cold air and let out warm air should be blocked and sealed.
Tips For Keeping Your House Warm #3 – Use Your Curtains
There’s huge heat loss through your windows, particularly at night. So make sure you close the curtains when it starts getting dark. This can save you on your heating bills by trapping warm air inside. If you get the sun, make sure you open your curtains during the day too to get the most out of this free energy. If you have a south facing window, the sun can heat up your home for free!
Tips For Keeping Your House Warm #4 – Stay In One Room
If you’re spending a lot of time at home this winter, consider heating just one room. Close doors leading to other rooms in the house and trap in the warm air. Wear multiple thin layers rather than one thick layer. Multiple thin layers of clothing trap air close to your body better than thick layers.
Tips For Keeping Your House Warm #5 – Use Your Oven For Heating
The oven is a great source for heating if you’ve heated food. Most people turn off their oven and close the door, trapping heat inside it and wasting it! Why? Once you have finished cooking open the door and use that heat!
Tips For Keeping Your House Warm #6 – Bleed Your Radiators
Air trapped in your radiators can mean your central heating runs less efficiently than it might. By bleeding them with a radiator key, you let the air out and the water can reach more parts of the radiator. If there’s trapped air in your radiators you’re only heating part of them with the top part of the radiator sitting idle! See how to bleed a radiator.
Tips For Keeping Your House Warm #7 – Service The Boiler
Your boiler heats the home but from time to time a service will help it run at maximum efficiency.
Tips For Keeping Your House Warm #8 – Know The Best Temperature
If you start getting cold, it can take much more energy getting back to feeling ok. You might run a hot bath, for example, if you find the cold getting to your bones. Knowing the best temperature to maintain is often more economical than running heating on high, and then letting the temperature drop, only to re-heat again.
Aim to set your main room thermostat somewhere between 18°C and 21°C. Having a set temperature in your home can actually save you money if you’re used to flip-flopping between too hot and too cold.
Tips For Keeping Your House Warm #9 – Keep Moving
If you’re very static in your home, it can be easy to get cold as your body temperature drops. Even the heating doesn’t help once you start getting cold. So don’t forget to move around every hour or so if you’re very static in your home. Movement, even if it’s just walking around for a few minutes helps get your blood pumping and heats you up. You can even set a timer for an hour or so to remind you to get up and walk around so you don’t let the cold get to you.
Tips For Keeping Your House Warm #10 – Hot drinks
Don’t forget using hot drinks can help you keep warm when the temperature has dropped. Make a habit out of making a hot drink and it also gets you moving and up from your chair if you’re very static!
Tips For Keeping Your House Warm #11 – Hot Bath
If you get a chill in the winter, run a hot bath to warm yourself up! Have you ever run a hot bath and then just let all that hot water drain away? Why not leave that still hot water after you’ve taken a bath. That’s some nice extra heating if you leave the hot water to naturally cool and let the plug out once it’s helped heat your home!
See also our post on elderly vulnerabilities in the cold weather.