How to Keep the Heat Inside and the Bills Down

Ok, so you've been hearing all about it on the news for months. Carbon tax, increase in electricity prices and all that. Here in Tassie alone, we are getting a electricity price hike of 26% as of 01/07/12 and that's without the carbon tax implications.

With that in mind, Roge and I have been working out how we can make our house more energy efficient and therefore save us money.

One thing that has been bothering us since the day we moved into this house, is the amount of draughts that it has. Yes it's an old house but there are still things that can be done to plug up some of the holes. First job, taking off the interior architraves and squirting expanding foam into the gaps around the edge of the windows. Hence stopping all the draughts every time the wind blows.

As you can see, we had some pretty significant gaps behind those architraves.

Ruler courtesy of the Taylors latest trip!

This is a pic of our now, plugged up gaps. Roge had a bit of an accident with the foam and it expanded so much that it fell down the wall and onto the floor but a bit of nail removal polish cleaned that up (good old Google let us in on that tip!)

I have also invested into a few door "snakes" although I brought them before I read a friend of mine, Sheryl's tip on how to make your own out of old woollen scarves. You should have a look here, it's quite clever and her blog is always so interesting and funny.

This photo is of the door snake, not of Tina the dog!

We have polished floor boards and whist this makes my floors easy to clean when there's a spill, they can be quite cold in winter and I've noticed mine are quite draughty. To combat this, I've gone and visited the local carpet shops and picked up end of rolls/offcuts of carpet, had them bound and put them in all the main rooms. It a fraction of the cost of buying mats, you usually get a bigger piece of carpet and it does the trick to keep the draughts at bay.

So one window done and it's already made quite a difference. I can feel the room keeping it's temperature much better when I put the heater on and therefore being able to turn down the thermostat a few degrees. That in itself should save a fair few dollars over the course of the winter. We still need to do a few more windows around the house as there are a few "offenders" when it comes to draughts but we'll get to them.

I've also read that if you have air vents up on your walls, you should cover them in winter as this too lets out all the warm air. Also try closing doors to rooms you don't use during the day as well as to your bathroom. Let's face it, you don't need that room to be warm all day round.

I'd be interested to hear from anybody who has more energy saving tips so send me a message if you do.

Keep warm everyone, I'm off to put on another jumper and make a cuppa.