We’ve come to the last week of our weekend winterizing challenge! For this week’s post, I dug deep into my home’s winterizing challenges to stop the chill breezes from blowing in our house. The leaky mail slot
Especially if you have a programmable thermostat, you might find the nights are getting a bit chilly these days. At our house, which is a 1950s brick home with a lot of concrete — “built like a bunker,” according to some contractors, and about as warm as one — we get deeply chilled at night. When we moved into our current home, we began heating our bedrooms with space heaters on cold winter nights. That meant that we could turn the furnace down at night (we use a programmable thermostat that does the job for us). However, the space heaters also made our electricity use jump from 450 kilowatt hours during a summer month to 789 kilowatt hours during October 2005.
This week, my challenge partner, Jennie at Cheap Thrills, looks at staying warm at night with the old-school techniques of making homemade bedwarmers. Her timing is perfect, because in Colorado this week we were hit with this:
Want to join the Weekend Winterizing Challenge? Read all about it here. We’ve owned two homes in the past nine years, and lived in plenty of rentals. Thus, I’ve experienced a whole slew of window options. In turn, I’ve seen a lot of ways to add insulating power to those windows:
‘Tis the season for winterizing. In addition to our challenge, there is a lot of great information on the Web. If you want to look beyond today’s earlier post on winterizing windows, I came across this post on some non-heating ways to save energy in the winter.
Week 1 – Cheap Thrills on renters’ window insulation and Cheap Like Me (and sign up here) Week 2 – Cheap Like Me on caulking & replacing windows; more tips & links Week 3 – Cheap Thrills on making your own bedwarmers. I wrote about bubble wrap & an energy calculator. Week 4 – Cheap Like Me lays out the electric blankets to stay warm. Week 5 – Cheap Thrills looks into bright ideas for saving energy on light bulbs. Week 6 – Cheap Like Me takes on greening holiday lights with LED bulbs – and a few other green holiday tips — and see Cheap Thrills’ take here.
