The truth hurts: Keep rooms as cold as possible (the true key to saving money is minimizing the heat loss from as many walls, floors, windows and ceilings as possible.) The colder a particular room is, the smaller the amount of heat that is lost to the outdoors.
The shock of the monthly cost of heating continues. Energy costs are not going down any time soon. For some it is almost as much as their food or mortgage bills.
The problem is that our large houses in America are very hard to heat. The bigger the space, the more it costs to heat. Here at Mor Electric Heating, we think alot about heat loss calculations. It is amazing how much more heat is lost from a larger wall or roof area exposed to the outdoors. More windows, more walls and wall space and larger roofs are what heat loss is all about. Heat lost to the outdoors has to be replaced with a furnace (natural gas or propane), heating oil, wood, pellets, electric heaters or other method. Every square inch matters. It is also amazing how even a 1 degree F temperature increase in the air space on the inside of those walls or ceilings makes the amount of heating you are providing to the air in your neighborhood go up. Yes, you are heating the outdoors! So the solution is to reduce the air temperature in your house. That is a hard pill to swallow, but it is the only answer that is highly effective.
The truth is that the only big way to save money on heating costs is to make as many rooms in the house as cold as possible without the pipes freezing (typically the basement is the only danger area.)
Wear your winter coat inside the house? If it really bothers you then maybe keep it nearby for those rarely entered rooms but definitely wear a sweater all the time.
People are desperately trying to lower their heating bill by installing electric heaters in the rooms they tend to use the most. It’s called zoning, and it works very well. These smart customers see their furnace or oil burner as the enemy and they are doing everything they can to keep it from firing up. Extra insulation, under door sweeps, closing doors, window film etc. are all helpful as well. Many of our customers have electric heat (wall heaters, baseboard heaters, ceiling heaters, etc.) installed in every room with a thermostat in every room. They micro manage the temperature of each room faithfully by making adjustments to each thermostat and with programming of the set-back thermostats. It takes some work (and for that many heaters it is also some work to install that many heaters and potentially a 50 or 100 amp sub-panel off your main breaker panel), but customers are reporting that they are cutting their heating bill in half or a third and that can be well over $1,000 per year.
Tips:
• Turn down your thermostat, especially at night and unoccupied hours – every degree you can decrease your temperature setting will save you 2% to 4% in your heating bill
• Open your drapes during the biggest sunlight hours and close them at night
• Caulk around window, doors, and wherever air may leak in or out of the house
• Insulation in the attic (Many people are installing 24″ of blown in fiberglass with great results)
• Use Programmable Thermostats which automatically set back the temperature at night.
Check out some electric comfort heaters here:
and here