Home Comfort (Heat)

[keels]

Well, winter finally hit our neck of the woods. Down to -15 today. Once again I'm reminded how cool the house is and how much the furnace runs. So on that line, do you guys have any diy tricks that would make a house more comfortable?

I don't have the budget to start replacing windows so I'm thinking of alternatives that don't cost a lot of money.

So far I've:
- taped the exposed duck work in the house
- insulated around all exterior electrical fixtures using the foam insulators
- sealed all opening windows with temporary cocking (draft seal).

Any other ideas?

Cheers, Ryan

[TDHofstetter]

Heat-shrink window film makes a lot of difference, ESPECIALLY on single-pane windows.

Look up in the attic - the insulation there should be as thick as a good mattress. If it's less, add more.

Walk around EVERYWHERE in the house, feeling for cold air coming in. Basement, every floor, attic door (or scuttle hatch). Stuff cracks with fiberglass insulation or caulk ("rope caulk" comes in handy sometimes) or foam "backer". Don't seal every leak or the furnace won't run right, but you can knock down most of the leaking this way.

Add curtains to every window. Every kind of curtain helps, even sheers, but you get the MOST help from quilted curtains that seal around the edges.

Close (I mean CLOSE) every room you don't NEED open, every time. Like bedrooms - if nobody's going to be going about their business in a bedroom all day, keep it SHUT all day. Open it to warm it up about an hour before bedtime.

Turn down the thermostat to 60 or lower overnight, every night. If you have trouble remembering to do that, install a setback thermostat.

SHOVEL SNOW AGAINST YOUR BASEMENT WALLS on the outside. Snow serves as insulation against the VERY COLD (colder than the snow) winter air.

EDIT: Also... get a big humidifier for the house. Your target humidity should be around 50%, adjusted downward until frost no longer forms on the insides of your (sealed, heat-shrink-filmed) windows. 50% is about ideal - 65 degrees at 50% feels very much like 75 degrees at 20%, which is the humidity your house will try to reach if you don't humidify. As an added benefit, you won't get those dang winter hangnails or shock yourself silly after walking across the floor or throwing back the bedcovers.

[Leo Voisine]

Tim's got ya covered -- but how about a programmable thermostat - program the heat to go low at night then kick on an hour before you get out of bed. They are pretty cheap.

I think the biggest help will be the window wraps

Make sure you seal the bottoms of the cold doors - weather stripping - towel - of door sock.

Electrical outlets, light switches - on the INSIDE of the house that on an outside wall - should have a foam insulator gasket. Also, if there is a gap around the outer perimeter of the electrical box with the cover removed - you may be able to get some "great stuff" in those areas.

[larryh86gt]

Hi Ryan,
I have replaced all the doors and windows in my ranch home but even though they are supposed to be state of the art they still allow cold into the house. So for the doors I place a towel rolled up lengthways at the base of the door to hold the cold back. I have 3 sliding glass Anderson patio doors and 9 crank out Anderson windows that I cover with plastic sheet. (I buy the kits after the season is over, it's a lot cheaper then.) I also have a whole house fan in the ceiling that I put the plastic over. It makes a big difference overall. It also keeps the moisture from condensating on the glass.
Larry

[jim]

Humidifier will help you feel comfortable at lower tempatures for sure.
To heat a hard to heat room just trun your fan switch on the thermostat from Auto to" ON" This will pump the heat througout the house evening out the tempature in all the rooms. Costs a little to run the fan lke that but solves a "one cold room" problem.

[lexrex]

You can hire someone to come in with an infrared camera and take pictures for you for a very reasonable price (here anyway). These cameras are pretty amazing and will help you easily pinpoint missing insulation or other problems that cause different thermal patterns.

If you have forced air, be sure to close all vents above the first floor, allow the warm air to rise on it's own, don't pump it there.

I question the value of lowering the thermostat every night. The furnace will have to work that much harder to bring you up to a comfortable temperature each morning. In the last house I owned, which was very tight and well insulated, it was more cost effective to set it and forget it.

[TDHofstetter]

For real? In most cases it's well worth doing to let the house chill overnight & then pump it back in the morning. By extension, it's a lot like turning down the thermostat for a week & turning it up for the weekend - you don't burn as much raising the temperature as you do holding it 'cause the house radiates less heat with the temperature down than it does with the temperature up.

Also same principle as the emergency method of driving distance on too little fuel - you accelerate to about 55, pop it into neutral, shut off the motor, & let it coast down to about 15, then restart the engine (pop the clutch if it's manual) & accelerate (as fast as possible) to 55 again. You can pull around 60mpg that way in a pinch.

[keels]

I like the humidifier idea. Looking into installing one in the main plenum so the whole house will benefit.

I'm picking up some plastic window kits and installing them tonight. I was amazed at how much air leakage I could feel by placing my hand around the window frames.

Thanks again for the ideas.

Keep'em coming if you have anymore :-)

[larryh86gt]

Dec 17, 2009 9:43:10 GMT -6 keels said:

I like the humidifier idea. Looking into installing one in the main plenum so the whole house will benefit.

About 4 years ago I replaced my gas furnace with a 93% efficient gas furnace. That really helped keep the gas bills down. But I've noticed that the house does not dry out like it used to when the heating season started. So I have had to run a dehumidifier to remove a lot of moisture from the house until maybe 5 - 6 weeks into using the furnace.
None of my exterior walls in the house were insulated so over the course of a couple years on all the exterior walls I removed the drywall, insulated the wall, and re-drywalled. I did it one room at a time and in each room as I went I refreshed it with new paint, oak baseboards, and new floor coverings. It helped a lot in soundproofing the house also.
I think your temperatures run about the same as here.
Larry

[woodmannie]

If you got a heat pump, DON"T turn down the thermostat. They have a booster in them. If the temp change is more than 3 degrees, it kicks in and you could watch the meter spin. If you go away for a while, like vacation, then ya it save a lil, but day to day, you'll spend more.
On a gas/oil furnace, it does save ya to drop it down during the day/night. It may run a lil longer at first change, but then levels out. It's really only effective on 8 or more hrs between changes.
Me, I burn wood for heat, so I have easy control. If I ain't here, it cools down. ;D

Tom

[tw]

Hiring one of those infrared camera wizards is usually wasted money.
A cheaper way is to wait for a cold day and look at the hoarfrost that forms on the walls. In places where there is no hoarfrost will likely be a weak spot in the insulation. The method has the only shortcomming that the sun might disturb the pattern on the southern wall.

The window manufacturers often blow up the advantages of shifting out double glazed windows to triple glazed. If your windows are double glazed then just try to make the inner window as airtight as possible. If there is no way to install gaskets you could maybe tape the seams.

Adding insulation to the ceiling usually helps a lot. If you have an accessible empty unheated attic you can easily do the job yourself. They make a very good insulation wool from recykled paper. Is it availeable in Canada? Over here ceiling insulation is often about 40cm (16") thick.

And as a quick fix you can shovel snow against the basement walls just like Tim said. All the way to the windows if you want......But leave the snow in place where the water and sewage pipes are buried underneath;) A friend of mine showelled a lot of snow against his basement walls but in late winter the sewage pipe froze where he had uncovered the ground;)

An inner door inside the normal one helps a lot. Preferably with enough room between them so that you do not open both doors at the same time. A quick fix isd a thick curtain hanging inside the door.

An then there is of cause the finnish redneck method. Amputating the tail of the dog means that you will be able to let it out to pee and close the door afterwards much faster. Consequently letting out less heat. (this is a joke!) ;D

[woodmannie]

wish I'da seen that joke part. Dang, labs look funny bobbed

Tom

[rrich]

Dec 20, 2009 13:10:53 GMT -6 tw said:

An then there is of cause the finnish redneck method. Amputating the tail of the dog means that you will be able to let it out to pee and close the door afterwards much faster. Consequently letting out less heat. (this is a joke!) ;D

ME ;D
LOML That's awful!

[sawduster]

An then there is of cause the finnish redneck method. Amputating the tail of the dog means that you will be able to let it out to pee and close the door afterwards much faster. Consequently letting out less heat. (this is a joke!)

Well, there goes another keyboard filled with coffee. ;D

[maxwellsmart007]

As a fellow Canuck, I can tell you from experience that the window shrink films help me a LOT! Dropped my heat bill by 200 bucks a month by installing film, caulking all gaps, installing a new basement outside door (it was a CLOSET door before - really!) and other small fixes...they all add up!

Went from well over 350 dollars a month to 88 this year...turning down the heat at night helped a lot too!

Andrew

[CajunRider]

Jan 5, 2010 12:34:56 GMT -6 maxwellsmart007 said:

As a fellow Canuck, I can tell you from experience that the window shrink films help me a LOT! Dropped my heat bill by 200 bucks a month by installing film, caulking all gaps, installing a new basement outside door (it was a CLOSET door before - really!) and other small fixes...they all add up!

Went from well over 350 dollars a month to 88 this year...turning down the heat at night helped a lot too!

Andrew

This is how true environmentalists work. Doing things within grasp that will improve the efficiency of the things you own and use.

[pastorpaul]

About two months ago I installed the programmable thermostat I bought last season. It cuts the temp back to 60 on those days when I am at the hospital and Sundays when I am at church. Most of the rest of the time I try to run 65, but I sometimes have to override and take it up a few degrees. When I do want to override, it is a simple matter of raising or lowering the temp just for that one cycle (have four cycles for each day), or I can change the temp and put it in hold. I've already had about a 10 to 15 percent drop in my utility bill, but this extreme cold could change that next month.

Pastor Paul

[brburns]

Jan 9, 2010 7:44:55 GMT -6 CajunRider said:

Jan 5, 2010 12:34:56 GMT -6 maxwellsmart007 said:

As a fellow Canuck, I can tell you from experience that the window shrink films help me a LOT! Dropped my heat bill by 200 bucks a month by installing film, caulking all gaps, installing a new basement outside door (it was a CLOSET door before - really!) and other small fixes...they all add up!

Went from well over 350 dollars a month to 88 this year...turning down the heat at night helped a lot too!

Andrew

This is how true environmentalists work. Doing things within grasp that will improve the efficiency of the things you own and use.

And they do things that are cost effective, not the other wya around.

[keels]

Well, made a couple of changes to the house in the last couple of years that have seemed to help.

Two years ago we installed a new high efficiency gas furnace (to replace the old oil furnace we were using). This dropped our heating bill from $550 - 600 to $300 during the cold months (i.e. Jan, Feb).

This spring, I figured out the furnace wasn't operating properly. After kicking into stage 2 it would only stay on stage 2 for 30 seconds and then turn off. It would then start the proecess over starting at stage 1. The manufacturer and installer couldn't figure out what the problem was so they installed a brand new furnace for us.

Since then I installed a humidifier on the furnace, shrink wrapped the windows and placed stuffed socks at the bottom of a couple of doors that we rarely use.

Just got the heating bill. Last year it was $300 for this time and this year it is down to $150. At that rate I've already seen the money I spent returned!

Makes me a happy!

Ryan

[keels]

On another note, has anyone noticed how much laminate floors hold the cold?

We had carpet installed in our bedroom a couple of months ago so I pulled up a section of laminate to find parkay (sp?) underneath it. You could feel the temperature difference between the two floors (i.e. The parkay was much warmer). I wish I had a heat gun to see the exact difference.

Ryan