Winterizing Your Home
We bought our old house in the spring of 2003. A huge behemoth of a house.
You know when you buy a house you are all starry eyed in love and tend to gloss over the downsides of buying a house that needs every single room renovated. Like the fact that you will be spending every weekend working on it for years or until you drop dead. Which you will wish for on more than one occasion.
We were lucky that our house had modern insulation blown in at some point. But like most things that the previous owner did, stapling extension cords to the walls in lieu of hardwiring in new outlets comes to mind, it was done shoddily and sporadically. But certainly it was better than nothing.
As we have knocked out walls, removed plaster that was beyond repair, added windows where there were none. We have had the blown in insulation fall out of the walls and we have replaced it with more energy efficient insulation. We keep our heat turned pretty low during the winter months, it is a rare day that we turn the thermostat up over 58 degrees. And really, once you put on enough layers it isn’t that bad. You lose feeling to your extremities at a certain point and then you feel nothing. Oh, I kid.
I hate being cold. I dream of living somewhere tropical. But we haven’t had anyone lose extremities to frost bite yet, so that’s good.
The one thing that we have done that has made winter so much more enjoyable was to install a wood pellet stove in our family room. It is efficient. It burns the waste products from lumber mills. And, even though it isn’t super cheap, you actually feel warm for your money. What a novel idea that is, right? Warmth! It costs significantly less to run than our oil fired furnace.
Every year I have written a blog entry complaining about the pre-buy price of oil. And each year I look back at the previous year with a heavy sigh.
2002 under $1 per gallon
2003 $1.09
2004 $1.59
2005 $2.05
2006 $2.59
2007 $2.89
Even though the price per gallon has increased 200%, the amount of money that we have paid to heat our house has not increased. Proving that small energy efficient changes in you home can really add up.
This year we decided not to pre-buy. The pre-buy price was high, higher than what the current selling price is, and we thought we would take a gamble this year. You know what that means? Prices will skyrocket. And they have. My last bill was $3.09 a gallon.
So what can you do to make sure you aren’t wasting energy by sending your heat to the great outdoors.
The first step would be to check your insulation. Go look in your attic where your heat is literally flying out of your roof. Make sure you have storm windows, or new windows, with no cracked glass. Insulate your hot water pipes. This will save you money on heating your hot water, keep the water hot if it has to travel through an unheated basement to get to you, and prevent your pipes from freezing.
This Old House has a fabulous tutorial on how to make your doors draft proof by installing new weather seals. I go one step further and say make or invest in some of those stuffed draft dodgers for placing in front of seldom used doors and insulated curtains to draw at night on drafty windows.
And then? Invest in some down blankets and warm socks.
February 6th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Wow…I so feel your pain. We are in the midst of a restoration project involving a behemoth, as well! After all of the construction expenses, the heating and cooling costs might very well kill us! Sigh.
We have replaced every window in the entire building with new frames and low-E glass, new roof and high efficiency insulation. But with extremely high ceilings and unpredictable north Texas weather, it’s always going to be a challenge to keep the costs down.
Blankets and warm socks?
Check.