Reducing Heating Costs

(c) 2009 Jim Morrison

For every dollar’s worth of fuel your home consumes, how many pennies worth of heat actually stays inside your house? Most homes could be made a little more energy efficient with a little effort. Here are some tips to lower your heating bills this winter.

Lower your thermostat. You heard your father tell you a thousand times: “If you’re cold, put on a sweater!”, but for every degree you lower your thermostat, you save 3% on your fuel bill. In my experience, programmable setback thermostats do not save most households money. Unless you’re out of the house for relatively long periods of time and you have a very consistent schedule, a typical thermostat works best if you just pick a comfortable temperature and leave it there. Then, lower it at night, and when no one is home.

Weatherstrip your doors (I like the magnetic vinyl type of weatherstripping available at most home stores), or replace them with energy efficient doors. They’ll look better and keep the draft out.

Insulate your attic floor the exterior walls, and the basement/crawl space floor. The goal is to have a thermal barrier on the perimeter of the house which will keep the warmth in during the winter, and keep the heat out in the summer. Insulate as many exposed heating pipes and ducts as you can to make sure none of that heat is lost to unconditioned spaces like basements and attics.

Obviously, the better your heating system is maintained the more efficient it will be. Most people are good about having their oil fired equipment tuned up each year, but how about those gas burners? You’ve read it in this space before, but it bears repeating: All mechanical and combustion equipment should be thoroughly cleaned and serviced annually.

Replacing that old clunker of a heating system is an expensive proposition. Newer equipment is costly, but consumes less energy. However, if you are going to be living in your house for a long time, it may be worthwhile as prices are generally expected to rise.

When shopping for contractors to replace your system, be sure and insist that they them perform a heat loss analysis on your home to determine the precise size of the system you need. Most heating systems are overdesigned by a wide margin. This means most people bought too much equipment, and have unnecessarily high operating costs. Always try to buy the smallest, highest efficiency system available. This pays big dividends over time. Bigger is not better, you want something properly sized. Your system should be running almost continuously on the coldest day of the year. If it isn’t, it’s probably oversized.

Having an automatic vent damper installed on your smokepipe will dramatically lower standby losses in your system. It costs a few hundred dollars, but can save you up to 15% on your heating bill.

Replacing a standing pilot light with an electronic ignition also costs a few hundred dollars or so, but can reduce heating costs on gas fired systems by 5-10%.

A seminar on energy efficiency I attended a few years back provided me with an interesting bit of information. The average break even point for the investment of replacing your windows with doubleglazed windows is 40 years! That means it will take an average of 40 years for the accumulated energy savings to equal the cost of replacing those windows. The numbers will vary, of course, depending on how bad your old windows were, and how good your new windows are, but the numbers don’t work out quite as well as most people think.

A tight fitting, doublehung window with a properly installed, well caulked storm window is comparable in energy efficiency as new replacement sashes. Though window sales reps claim huge energy savings, the independent analyses just don’t bear them out.

Replacing your old sashes may remove a lot of lead paint from your home, which is an added bonus! I especially appreciate not having to paint my new, insulated vinyl clad windows!

Jim Morrison
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Morrison Home Inspections
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