Keeping Your Home Warm: What Do The Experts Do?

Keeping your home warm is notoriously challenging if you live further north. The moment a draft gets inside, it can suck all the warmth out of a property, leaving it feeling cold and bare. 

But, fortunately, there are strategies you can use to fight back. Experts have various techniques they use to keep their properties toasty without excessive energy bills. 

But what are they? That’s what you’re about to learn. We look at how you can keep your home warm and what the experts do to succeed. 

Regularly Monitor And Adjust Your Home’s Energy Usage

The first thing to do is to find out where you are now in terms of your energy consumption and usage. Once you understand your current situation, you are in a better position to make improvements. 

Look at your existing energy use and the amount of power you are consuming to keep your home warm. (Don’t focus too much on the price per unit, since this can fluctuate significantly). Once you have a benchmark, you have a way to compare your future energy use to what you’re consuming now. 

It also helps you have an energy audit. These let you understand where you are right now, and where you’d like to be in the future. You can check to see whether you have insulation in your cavity walls or the thickness of the insulating material in your attic. 

Knowing this information tells you where your home is losing heat and helps you make more targeted improvements. You may find that some aspects of your property are already in a good place, while others aren’t. 

Use More Natural Heat

The next step is to look for ways to leverage more natural heat. Allowing warmth to flood into your property during the day can be highly effective.

The best setup is to have a south-facing conservatory that can collect warm air and then circulate it into the rest of your home by leaving the door slightly ajar. However, you can also do things like opening the curtains and retracting blinds in the morning. South-facing windows will collect the most energy and perhaps warm your home by a couple of degrees, even if it is drafty. 

If you have unused rooms, consider closing them off from the rest of your property. This approach lets you warm the rooms that matter and leave the rest. 

Use Supplementary Heating

You can, of course, use supplementary heating as a temporary substitute. But you don’t want to rely on it all the time. 

The best supplementary heating is oil radiators. These use relatively little energy and can go on plodding away for hours. Considering electric underfloor heating can provide a more consistent and quicker heating solution for your home. However, they don’t create instant heat, like fan heaters, meaning they can take a long time before they take effect.

You can also get electric space heaters. These are great for smaller spaces, like offices, and reduce the risk of massively higher bills. 

Some households use wood-burning stoves. However, you need to be careful. While these can be incredibly inexpensive to run, you need a reliable source of wood. Getting it from renewable forests on your property is one option. Here you don’t pay anything (but require decent storage and drying facilities) but you can also buy from the store pre-dried fuel that lights immediately. 

Change How Your Home Distributes Heat

Another approach is to change how your home distributes heat. Setting it up so that you achieve better airflow can be a great way to save on your bills and energy usage. 

For example, start by pulling furniture away from radiators at the sides of your rooms. Giving them more space will help them suck in and churn out more heat. The same applies to vents, allowing heat to circulate better in rooms and making them feel cozier faster.

Another pro tip is to switch on your ceiling fans during the winter at a slow speed. Doing this pushes warm air back down into your rooms where you need it the most. 

Closing certain doors can sometimes also make a difference. Keeping them shut can help you retain more warmth in your interiors for longer. 

Combining this approach with methods for retaining natural heat can have an enormous effect on how your property feels on cold days. You feel more active and willing to work on your home or try new things. 

Reduce Heat Loss

Top of your list of priorities should also be methods for reducing heat loss. Leveraging these allows you to slash your energy usage while also increasing the temperatures your home can achieve. 

Start by sealing drafts – areas where cool air can escape your property. Sealing these off around doors and windows is often the single biggest thing you can do to keep your home warm. 

Many people contact a window replacement company to help them with this process since many gaps in their homes are hidden in window and door frames. These are often the hardest to address because doors, windows, and frames are often the wrong size. 

You can try to mitigate this heat loss by sealing your property. But these strategies don’t always work. While door snakes can have some effect, the overall impact is minimal. 

Another way to reduce heat loss (after sealing gaps around windows and doors) is to lay carpets. Strange as it may sound, these prevent the cold earth beneath your home from transmitting cool air during the winter. 

You can also try installing heavy curtains and blinds. These are handy when you want to augment the effectiveness of your existing double-glazing. 

Heavy curtains and blinds naturally warm your home, especially if you can layer them. However, the best options are thermal curtains. These can prevent warm air from getting in during the summer, and stop it from escaping in the winter, providing much-needed utility year-round. 

If you don’t want to make any permanent changes to your property, you could also try laying rugs. These can provide an extra layer of insulation in the bathroom or kitchen without having to become a feature of your property in all seasons. 

Make Your Heating System More Efficient

Another approach is to make your heating system more efficient. Getting it to work better improves the rate at which your home warms. 

Start by bleeding the air from your radiators. Often, heating systems don’t work properly because there is air stuck in radiator cavities, preventing water from getting to the metal’s total surface area.

Another pro tip is to use furnaces designed with energy efficiency in mind. Modern devices are often considerably less energy-consuming than units bought ten years ago. 

You should also maintain your heating system if you want it to run smoothly. Getting the engineer to come over every year can often save you 10% to 20% on your bills, making it worthwhile. 

Lastly for this section, think about installing a smart meter or another system to manage your heating. Intelligent thermostats can adjust their temperatures, allowing you to heat your home without wasting as much energy. 

Install Insulation

Finally, it’s a good idea to install as much insulation in your home as possible, even if you think it’s excessive. Modern standards call for at least a foot of insulating material in the attic and for foam to be injected into cavity walls. 

You might also want to consider adding insulation under your floors. This prevents cool temperatures from attacking your home from the ground up. 

So there you have it: some of the strategies the experts use to keep their homes warm.