Do You Know How to Lower Heating Bills?
On a monthly basis, the utility bill is always the largest expenditure that we have to face. Few of us like opening the envelope when we receive it, but we can do more than just cursing our luck as we can really work out how to lower heating bills ourselves with a little effort. While federal assistance is possible in cases of hardship, you can’t expect the utility companies to do much themselves, so take action.
When you are working out how to lower heating bills, scratching your heads trying to calculate why your rates are so high, look all around your home to find the answer. Call a crisis family meeting and make sure that all the other family members are willing to work equally as hard as you to cut back. Tell them that only you, as the head of household, is allowed to make adjustments to the heating thermostat and tell them that if they do not co-operate, you can easily buy one of those locking boxes to ensure that they cannot “spend” the money in this way!
The chances are that you have a room or two in your home that are rarely, if ever used. For example, a spare bedroom, or a loft room. You need to seal these rooms off, by closing all the heating vents in there and then keeping the doors closed. Put door draft stoppers against these entrances, the same way that you would consider these products for your external doors. You are now keeping your conditioned air in its place and not wasting it.
Always make sure that your main thermostat is in the room that you populate most frequently, such as a family room. There should be no thermostat in any room that you are trying to seal off and exclude.
There is no need to warm your home to a figure higher than 68. This is the optimum temperature for your frugal requirements. Make sure that your thermostat is programmable, so that you can also set the overnight temperature to 62 for when you are sleeping. In bedrooms, use a space heater which can be set to come on and warm the room just before you retire and to turn down when you are sleeping.
As you learn how to lower heating bills and create a warm room for your family, keep an eye open for signs of air leakage elsewhere. Look at all your windows and external doors, as these are often problematic. You don’t have to replace units or consider those expensive double glazing jobs, just get additional door or window draft stoppers for each location.
Be creative by all means when you are seeing how to lower heating bills, but be safe as well. Keep an eye on space heaters and turn them off whenever you’re not at home. Never be tempted to use open flames, gas or even your oven to heat your home, as we see far too many horror stories caused by house fires in these situations.
If you do not know how to lower heating bills any further and you find that you are still struggling to make ends meet, you might qualify for federal assistance to help you with your power bill.
