Every friend is worth 500 Btu’s per hour
Invite a bunch of friends over for a pot luck dinner. At 98.6° of body temperature, humans give off approximately 500 Btu’s every hour. Put enough people in the room, and you can heat it with human power. Not to mention the warmth of having your friends and family getting together.
Bundle up. Go outside. Enjoy the winter.
You can set your thermostat down five degrees, grab your hat and your mittens and go outside for a good invigorating walk around your block. Or strap on a pair of snowshoes and trudge off through the woods. You can skate, make a snowman, go bird watching, have a snowball fight, cross-country or downhill ski – there are lots of things to do outside in the winter. Actually, a little strenuous activity will warm you up while you’re saving money on that lowered thermostat. Exercise will help you stay in shape, and the better shape you’re in, the more efficiently your body can create its own warmth.
Invest in a high-efficiency oil-fired water heater
Ask your oil dealer about an indirect water heater system. With these modern water heaters, you can enjoy a practically endless stream of hot water. During the heating season, this hot water is basically free; a byproduct of your home heating use. In the summer time, Oilheat is one of the most cost-efficient methods for making hot water.
Five little ways to save on heating costs
Not everything you can do to reduce your energy usage is as dramatic as system upgrades and replacement windows. Here are five very simple but effective ways to reduce the cost of heating your home.
1. Vacuum your baseboard units: if you have baseboard heat, remove the baseboard covers to expose the heating pipes and their heat dispersing vanes. Use a kitchen broom to sweep as much dust and lint as you can and then vacuum it off. Believe it or not, this will help your baseboards transfer heat to the room more efficiently.
2. Remove obstructions: Anything that stands between your baseboards, radiators, or floor vents makes it harder for warmth to get to the rest of the room. Make sure that armchairs, couches, drapes, bookshelves, etc. are not blocking your heat sources. Be sure to keep rugs slightly away from baseboards, too, because air needs to be able to pass through the bottom of the baseboard in order to force warm air out of the top.
3. Keep your closet doors closed. You don’t need to keep your clothes at room temperature so why pay for the extra fuel.
4. Close your curtains and shades at night to trap heat inside; open them during the day to let heat from the sun in. And be sure to keep windows on the south side of your house clean to maximize solar gain.
5. If you have a waterbed, be neat and make your bed every day. The sheets, blankets, and bed spread will help insulate the water so you won’t have to pay quite so much to heat it.
Fireplace and woodstove dampers? What goes up must go out.
A fireplace is a wonderful feature to have in a home. Not very efficient for heating, but very special just the same. Woodstoves, too. But remember, once your fireplace fire or woodstove fire is totally out and no glowing coals or embers are left and the fireplace or stove is cool to the touch, it’s time to close the damper. An open flue is an open invitation for your home heating dollars to fly up and out of the chimney.
DON’T FORGET TO OPEN THE DAMPER WHEN YOU LIGHT A NEW FIRE.
Insulate. Insulate. Insulate.
Today’s homes are much better insulated than homes built 30 or even 15 years ago. Many classic older homes have been upgraded with new, more effective insulation. Still, it’s well worth taking an insulation inventory. Do you know the thickness and the quality of the insulation in your exterior walls, crawl spaces, and ceilings? Do you know their “R-Factor”?
Scientists use the R-factor to describe the differences in insulation effectiveness. The R stands for resistance to the flow of heat through the air (convection) or through solids (conduction). The higher the R factor, the slower heat travels through it.
If you have doubts about your insulation consult a local builder or insulation specialist for an expert opinion. You’ll find lots of do-it-yourself books and instructions on insulation at your local hardware store, too.
A quick insulation tip: Outlets, switches, and junction boxes on outside facing walls can be weak spots in your overall insulation system. Most hardware stores carry spray cans of foam insulation with easy instructions on how to seal off those cold spots.
Another quick insulation tip: Consider thermal window quilts. These thick, quilted fabric shades can help keep your home warmer by adding another layer of “dead air” in your window casing which helps prevent cold from leaking in.
Yet another quick insulation tip: Use foam rubber pipe insulation to insulate any piping that is near the outside walls of the house.
Let the sun shine in
In Maine, the sun rises and sets slightly south of a true east to west line. That's why "southern exposure" is very desirable. It's very basic passive solar. Even in the old days, builders would try to situate a new home so that the south side windows let the sun shine in and the north side of the house had fewer and smaller windows — sometimes no windows. Another old-timers' trick was to plant deciduous trees close to the south side of the house. That way, the leaves on the trees would block the sunlight in the summer, keeping the house cool. Then, when the leaves dropped in the fall, the sunlight would shine through and warm the home in the winter.
Where's the south side of your home? If you have deciduous trees, you're in great shape. But if your south side has lots of sun-blocking evergreens you might consider thinning or removing them to take advantage of free solar energy. A word of caution though: Depending on how large your windows are you might consider gradually thinning a group of evergreens to find the right balance between not enough and too much sun. You don't want to discover that your home becomes an oven in the summer because you took out too many trees.