how do you prepare for winter to cut down on your gas bill?

I want some ideas on how to cut my bills this winter. Thanks!

We have all electric. I haven't turned on my heat in like five years. But my sister keeps the heat turned up high in her room b/c she is always cold. I am never really cold. I just put on an extra sweatshirt if I am.

How do you not use heat in CT? Don't the pipes burst???

just not in my bedroom...so far no pipes have ever burst.

I was scratching my head trying to think of a way I could fore go heat this winter !

and have a space heater (also electric)

So, I will turn down the thermostat as low as I can deal with it, and use the space heater where I am in the house.

Long range, I'm looking into solar or wind power, but that's several years away.

Letting heat escape will run up a bill.
As for cutting the gas bill We turned off our gas heater and went to small space heaters in everyroom.They run up the elctric bill but nowhere near as high as the gas bill would be.

live downwind from a republican... the hot air they create is amazing. :)

It seems silly, but for me it works. I think it tunes my body in for the cold.

I got the idea after I stopped Ironworking in Florida to work in offices. Seemed odd that 100 degree weather can be either "ok" or "horribly hot." I moved back to NC in tough times, financially, and often had to decide about heat vs food vs shelter vs world.

:hi:

EDIT: plus it's fun to wear few clothes :D

Try to acclimate as much as possible to the cold. Of course, it always gets to a point where I can't stand it anymore and then once I avail myself of heat I am spoiled for the remainder of the cold season.

Personally I think we should start a big DU compound for the cold months, and keep each other warm.

Wear thermal underwear (tops and bottoms), have plenty of sweatshirts around and sweatpants. They're the warmest. (Jeans are not warm). I have a pair of slippers with pouches on them where I can slip in microwaveable heat pouches. I just love those! Keep your heat at 60 degrees and when you use your oven, keep it open when you're done cooking to take advantage of the heat. Needless to say, have lots of warm blankets and don't sleep alone. If you're lucky, you sleep with another person, but never underestimate the body heat of dogs and even cats. (Be nice to them and provide treats or they won't sleep with you; they have standards, too).

(we got one from Lowe's) in the den where we are most of the time, turn the thermostat way down on the rest of the house.

Maybe take it out to a remote field and blow it up! BOOM. That bastard has cost me hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars.

Fortunately we live in a mild climate. Nobody in the house would die of the cold, and the pipes wouldn't freeze.

But I've lived places that plan wouldn't work. There three layers of glass was essential, good double panes + removable winter panes. When we had little money we'd use that plastic film.

Foam and caulk every last possible leak, and weatherstrip doors. A side benefit of that is it makes it more difficult for insects (ugh...roaches....blech!) to escape the vacuum cleaner.

At some point you can make a house so air tight you need an air exchanger, but I've never got that far.

I haven't lit the pilot light in the furnace in over a decade.

The lion share comes from the country roads. The Utility company contracts a tree pruning outfit to maintain clearance around the lines. The boys are good, they brush out the limbs and cut and stack the wood into manageable four foot lengths. I burn everything from Osage orange and olive, to oak and black walnut. Olive is grand, but take two full years to dry out. Osage is dense and burn well for a long time. Walnut burns way to fast and produces too much ash, but is easy to work. Almond is the best all around burner; some of it comes from my yard, plus I have a friend that sells me his ugly crap almond, the stuff that doesn't stack well or measure up for clean straight split city selling cord.

We'd have a wood stove if we had land to grow the stuff! A cord of wood costs so much, you may as well blast your electric heat up to 80. Up here, we have alot of pine, which of course you know is not good for burning, but there's also maple and birch.

I used the cheapest insulated blanket in twin size that I could find. I tacked the quilt to the top of the window and used spring loaded clips on the sides about every 18 inches. then when I want the covering up, like in the summer, I fold it like a fan and put the clips over a hook. If I use the idea in my living room I use a solid color, but in the cabin at Christmas this was just right.

A lot of the things you would do at home you can do at the library or the mall or a coffee shop or cafe or wherever. Surf the web, catch up on email and reading, pay bills, follow the news, exercise (mall walks), let your kids play in the playland at McD's (much as I hate them corporately I feel no compunction in sucking up their heat and online access, lol!), do your knitting, socialize... whatever.

Taken to an extreme, with a little planning you would only have to heat your house for the hours you slept there. :)

My living room, 2nd and 3rd bedroom face south-southeast, so those blinds are opened up completely until the sun doesn't shine through them any more, then the blinds get closed, later the curtains get drawn. It's enough to raise the temperature in the house ten degrees or more without, while keeping the thermostat set at a comfortably low setting. The fact that my townhouse is only four years old and very well insulated helps a bit too. In the two years that I've lived here, my gas bills have totaled well under $1000 dollars for both heating and hot water (summer bills are around $20, Jan, Feb, and March a bit over $100 each).

If it's too warm with the sweater on, turn down the heat.
Turn the thermostat down a little bit more the colder it gets. If you have it set at 65, turn it down to 60. When it's bitterly cold out even a 50 degree room will feel comfortable if you're wearing a sweater.

Insulate properly if you can, but even if you're in an apartment you can cut drafts and heat loss cheaply by installing rope caulk and new door sweeps. Have heavy or insulated drapes on all windows and draw them shut each night. Open them during the day to let in some solar heat.

As mentioned above, closing off rooms will help too. Close the vent or shut off the heater and shut the door. If you can shut off a room entirely, try closing the vent if the room isn't near the thermostat.

we have a ground source heat pump that uses the earths constant temperature as a heat exchanger. Constant (for OK) 58 degrees makes cheap heating and cheap cooling. No direct fossil fuel involved, just that used to make the electricity, and we use 50% less than traditional heating.

That said, we have a big old farm house and the front sun room gets cold at night so we use a kerosene heater if it gets below 25. Kerosene is not cheap however, though the heater works fab.

of our gas furnace use.
Looks like it will pay for itself in 3 or 4 winters.
Also getting new windows.

mark

It really does help keep a draft out.

make sure the windows and doors stay closed unless it's a nice day. This year I'm thinking a little more about it. We're going to caulk around the windows and put up some of that film on the inside...and I'm gonna knit another sweater (or three). Maybe a blanket to wrap up in when it's cold.

We don't usually keep the thermostat set too high...but I hate, hate, HATE to be cold. I love the winter, but I like the cold to stay OUTSIDE.

:hi:

We have electric but it makes a huge difference in the winter bills. I would assume it would work the same way with gas.

Put it directly under your heater. After you put your laundry through the washing machine, hang it on the clothes rack and then turn the heater on. It will dry the clothes faster, humidify the air so it feels warmer and you save money on the dryer if you use it. Plus air dried clothes just feel cleaner to me.

Other than that, put on a sweater and hat. It gets pretty damn cold where I am (down around 10*F for weeks at a time) and I still only use the heat a few days each year. Bundle up, drink hot tea, sit close to the lights when they're on, get a snuggly pet to lie on your feet.

On edit: Also, gain some weight. A few winters ago, I was down about seventy pounds from where I am now and I was soooo frickin' cold. I'm not saying gain seventy pounds, but an extra ten or so isn't so hard to shed in the spring and the personal insulation makes a big difference.

keep the heat as low as possible (but my animals need warmth, so I don't go below 62), use oil-filled plug-in radiator heaters because electric is still cheaper than gas and use them only in the areas where we are in at that time, install weatherstripping on all doors, wear layers and huddle under blankets, let the kid sleep with me more often (she's a mini furnace), hang dark heavy curtains. I installed outlet sealers, as they are usually a big area for drafts to come through. LOTS of super warm blankets on the bed.

I just realized that my suggestion is probably not as helpful as it sounds. :(

Unless your pets are cold-blooded animals or birds.

when it comes time to turn on the heat, the projects are big enough to keep me warm while I work on them.

First questions need to be considered.
Do you own or rent the dwelling? (or what ROI time line you are considering.)
Where are the major heat losses? (Drafts, Attic insulation, Windows)
How efficient is the heating system? (Gas in general is fairly good, but?)

You will loose more heat to drafts in the home than anything else. Find them and add Caulking, weatherstripping etc. (Look around windows, doors, plumbing, vents, etc.)

Attic insulation should be 12+ inches depending on your area of the country. Here is Mass the Gov. is recommending R-49.

Check exterior wall insulation up to government recommendations.

Check for areas that give off more heat than others. Identified by either cold spots inside and/or warm areas(melted snow) on the exterior. These indicate area's where the insulation is not installed properly.

Single pane glass is a poor insulator. But new Energy efficient windows are expensive and will have the longest ROI. While not as good you can put shrink wrap plastic over the windows, hang blankets/quilts over them. Install storm windows, close off unused rooms etc.


I put a double pane thermal storm/screen door over the front door of the house. Don't know what I saved in fuel but that area of the house right in front of the door is no longer a cold spot. I have 8inc ches of attic insulation currently and intend to get it up to R-49. Along with replacing the recessed light fixtures in the vaulted ceiling, as the snow directly above melts long before the rest of the roof.

Hope this helps. OLTG

Our side porch is enclosed but doesn't have good windows - so we put up foam weather stripping and cover them in plastic.

Foam weather stripping in the rest of the windows to seal them up as best we can. Same for around doors, and we close off areas of the house we don't use in the winter. Still have to put up insulation in cellar ceiling.

thermostat is kept at around 62 degrees, just enough to keep the boiler from shutting completely down and leaving us with no hot water - and when we are home we fire up the wood stove. Stacked 10 cords of wood last month, that should last us the winter.

Last winter my partner was home - she had been laid off and wasn't working. Kept the wood stove going essentially round the clock. Used less than 300 gallons of oil last winter.

This year, not sure, she's working a temp job that is suppose to end in mid-December. If it's not extended and she hasn't found another job - then we'll be burning wood round the clock.

Worked for me. :shrug:

I figured when I'm at work or even sleeping, I don't need to have my house that warm. To be honest, the only time a cold house bugs me is when I wake up in the morning. So I figured if I have thermostat with a timer I'm gonna set it to warm up for about 3 hours each day and the rest of the day, even when I'm at home, it can be cooler.

n/t

Knitting's useful, too.