Tips to Winterize Your Home
For those of you in the Midwest, such as the Quad Cities, winterizing your home is extremely important. Through simple, yearly steps, you can protect your house from bone-chilling drafts, bursting pipes, and unnecessarily high energy bills. To get started, here is a general checklist that every homeowner can follow.
Deter the Drafts
One of the main reasons your house is so freezing in the winter is due to drafts getting under doorways. Naturally, no door can be perfectly flush with the floor. There will always be a tiny gap, almost to the naked eye, that lets the cold air in and the warm air out. Draft guards can be purchased at virtually any home improvement store or home furnishing store for as little as $10. Sliding these guards under your door will help prevent the drafts from occurring. If you are feeling extra frugal today, you can roll up a towel and place it along the bottom of any exterior door to accomplish similar deterrences.
Un-gunk the Gutters
After having your fill of cleaning out the gutters during the fall, most homeowners put gutter-cleaning out of their minds. Unfortunately some trees are stubborn and will continue to drop leaves through the early parts of the winter.
Towards the early portion of winter, in late November, you should do one last thorough cleaning to remove any leftover leaves and dirt buildup. Doing so will ensure that melted snow and rain can flow freely through your gutters instead of building up and overflowing into dangerous icicles.
Reverse the Fan
This is a tip most homeowners aren’t even aware of. The fans that are fixed to ceilings can usually spin both clockwise and counterclockwise. In the summer, fans move counterclockwise to help cool off the room. However, in the winter, you can set them to spin clockwise which pushes hot air from the ceiling towards the ground.
Wrap the Windows
Windows are a common cause of lost heat throughout your home. Luckily they make fairly inexpensive kits that come with window film to help prevent this heat loss. It might not look the prettiest but let’s face it, are you really staring out your windows at all of the barren trees and dead grass in the winter?
Install New Insulation
Installing new insulation is obviously a more costly solution to your winterizing woes. The good thing is that once you’ve done this, you can cross it off your winterizing checklist for years to come. Having a quality insulation that prevents heat exchange will tremendously help the overall temperature of your house in both the winter and summer months.
Replace the Filters
Replacing air filters should be something you do on a routine basis. Air filters improves the efficiency of your HVAC unit because a clean filter allows for an easier flow of air. If air is getting trapped from a filthy filter, your HVAC unit has to work longer in order to reach the desired temperature. This puts unnecessary strain on your unit. New filters can cost as little as $10.
Protect the Pipes
Check the water pipes around your house and see if they are warm to the touch. If they are, you most likely will want to wrap them during the winter months. This helps in two ways. First, it helps keep the metal of the pipe warm thus creating a warmer pipeline for warm water to travel through. Cold metal will cool the warm water as it makes its way to your faucets and showerheads. The second way wrapping your pipes helps you, is to prevent frozen pipes. Frozen pipes can burst, leaving you or the plumber with a nasty mess to clean up.
For more information, contact Eco Insulation online for a quote, or call us at 563-223-8681.
