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Tips For Saving A Few Dollars This Winter! |
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Posted By: abelajohnb
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration projections the average American family will spend $1,000 on heat this season!
I wanted to share some tips they offer, plus a few of my own, that I've already done to help save myself some of that $1000 bucks, which I'm sure I could use on helping to further the Kingdom of Christ!
Lower the Water Temperature
This is for those of us without a Tankless Water Heater... One of the best things you can do to save a few bucks is to turn down the heat setting to around 120 degrees (most folks seem to use 160 degrees). Many people thing a higher level of hot water means a hotter shower in the morning, or a warmer bath at night if the case be such. That is not exactly true however... you see, by having a lower setting it just means there will not be as much scalding hot water to start with at the beginning of your shower! Water-heater thermostats can be inaccurate so don't trust the dial.. instead grab a cooking thermometer and throw it under your hot water tap. Reducing the heat setting and checking it a few times a year can save you 10-15% of your normal hot water heating bill!
Close Off Unused Rooms
This is one of my big peeves... folks who walk into a room that is hardly ever used and then not shut the door on the way out! Why heat a room that isn't being used! Close doors ((especially those farther from the primary source of heat, has to travel a lot further... and thus the harder the heater has to work!). If you know you are not going to have visitors or family over, and you live in a house with more rooms then what you need... seal them off and try living in only the rooms you need to occupy -- chances are pretty good you will save a serious amount of money, and stay even more nice and toasty! Doing so can save your overall heating bill from 3-5% this winter!
Spray Foam
This stuff is one of my favorite tips to share with folks! Go to the local store and pick up a few cans of spay foam. They will only cost you about $5 bucks a can, but can save you a LOT of money over the years! You can spay this stuff into almost every small crack in your house - from your walls, to your floors, to your windows... and something almost nobody thinks about doing... if you get the right kind of spray foam, you can take the covers off your wall power sockets and spay some in each of your wall plug-ins around the house! While it may seem petty... just think about how much air escapes your nice warm bedroom or office because of air sneaking out through all those power plug ins!
Use Ceiling Fans
This should be a pretty obvious one, but I'd like to add a personal tip at the end of this one... You know that ceiling fan that keeps you cool all summer can just as easily warm you in winter! Using it on the reverse setting ((most fans have one)), set on low, so that it pushes warm air that has risen to the ceiling back to the ground. This lets you adjust the thermostat down a few degrees without suffering for it! Now not all of us have ceiling fans (I don't happen to have any in my place), so I went out and bought me a Honeywell HT800 Super Turbo Fan to solve the problem! I just found a spot in my house where there was a high counter (in my case I have a wall mounted book case and threw it on the top of it) and presto, a revised ceiling fan! It is estimated that if you run this daily (usually at night when everybody is home with the heater cranked up or the fireplace burning hot) you can easily save 3 percent of your heating bill by reducing the thermostat and going with a fan!
Hot Water Insulation Blanket
A major source of wallet-loose comes from our hot water heaters, but thankfully there are a few things we can do about solving some of that. The first thing is by picking up a Water Heater Insulation Blanket. You might want to keep in mind that most of the heat loss is on the top of the heater, so what I did was to cut some of the insulation from the bottom of the blanket in order to make a "hat" that goes on the top of the tank! You'll have to do a lot of cutting and taping to make that look neat but once you do that, you'll realize the bulk of the heat loss is not in the tank itself, but the pipes leading out of the tank. Which leads us to the need to get some Foam Pipe Insulation or some nifty Pipe Wrap! Energy Star's Doug Anderson suggests covering the first 5 to 10 feet of the pipe coming out of the heater with foam pipe insulation - it takes less than 10 minutes to wrap the pipe (check the diameter of your pipe before you shop). Doing both of these steps will cost you about $30 bucks but save you big-time throughout the year - not just during the cold winters!
Self-Adhesive Foam Weather Strip
To seal a gap in a closed door or window, apply a strip of foam tape to the top of the frame. You'll need less than five minutes per door or window and pay $2 to $4 for 10 feet of tape. It comes in 3/8- and 3/4-inch widths. I had to put some of this around a couple of my doors and could tell the difference the first night!
Door Blankets
Ok, you will not find this one at the local hardware store... and it sort of applies to the section above about sealing off rooms you do not use. Inside of every door in my house that I rarely go into I placed four wall hooks - the kind that come in a box of a dozen or so for a few bucks at almost any store! I found some that were close to the same color as my walls and stuck them in the walls above the door frame. Then I went into a closet I probably haven't opened for years and dug out a bunch of "mexican blankets" -- you know, those kind we use to by in Mexico for $5 bucks or so - and then stuck the blankets onto the hooks. I did this on the inside of the rooms I never go into so I don't have to look at them all day long, of course. Between the above Foam Weather Strips and my "door blankets" I have pretty much been able to eliminate 99% of the airflow into rooms I have no desire for my hot air to be going! By using the wall-hooks it makes it very fast and very easy to simply take the "wall blankets" down should family or friends stop by!
Window-Insulating Film
Now this stuff is just plain cool !! ((no pun intended) Short of installing energy-efficient windows, the best thing you can do to cut down on heat loss through windows is to cover them with some clear insulating film. To install it, you lay a sheet across the glass and tape it to the frame, then use a blow-dryer to shrink it, which makes it adhere to the glass. The process takes 10 to 30 minutes to install and can be bought for between $5 and $10 bucks! I LOVE this stuff.
In Closing
Anyway those are some of my suggestions for keeping your house warmer and your pocket-book with more money in it... who else has some methods to help??
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Posted: 01/18/08 9:16pm - Total Views: 679 - Category: Finances / Money
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poodlelady |
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Posted by:
poodlelady 
(Posted: 01/19/08 1:57pm)
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Thanks for sharing this John, I certainly found a few things I can use here. I need to check out the water heater blankets and see if they are safe for gas water heaters as well as the pipe wrap and that foam for around outlets as we have some drafty outlets. Yuppers that window film is great stuff and if you have an in wall air conditioner it works to seal drafts from them too. With the wind chill it's 20 below zero today so these tips will certainly come in handy here!
Be Blessed
Poodle
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kraftykatz |
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Posted by:
kraftykatz
(Posted: 01/20/08 9:51am)
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My local utility company will come out to a consumers home and do an energy analyses for free. They were very helpful. My large 4-bedroom house used less energy then my mother's 2 bedroom bungalow almost half actually.
One can also make a door draft. It is simply a long piece of fabric sewn the length of your door, stuffed with fiberfill and placed at the bottom of an outside entry door. You can make one with a cat or dog head.
KraftyKatz
 drinking tea
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hopeforamerica |
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Posted by:
hopeforamerica
(Posted: 02/20/08 9:41pm)
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Interesting! My heating bill's been $200.00 a month for the last two months. I live in an older home and had the rugs taken out about six months ago to reveal beautiful old hardwood. But is it ever cold in here now! God bless.
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Member Biography |
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Raised in a private Christian school until his senior year, Mr. Abela has been around the Christian Faith nearly his entire life. Shortly after entering High School he became involved in researching his Native American heritage and soon found himself deeply involved in the Native American religion. Shortly before his...
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