Winter Tips

How is your Home's 'Physical Fitness?'

With high heating oil and natural gas prices, the “physical fitness” of your home can make the difference between soaring energy bills or comfortable savings this winter.

An energy-efficient home is a strong defense against winter winds, rain, sleet, snow, and chill while also protecting the environment and increasing national security by cutting wasteful energy use. A home "energy diet" benefits your pocketbook and the planet, notes the Alliance to Save Energy, which offers consumers step-by-step home physical fitness tips to cut energy bills and increase comfort:

Is Your Home Leaking Energy Dollars? First Plug Energy Leaks

• Heating the outdoors? If your home is drafty, you are. Check your home's first line of defense against the elements – walls, floors, roof, windows, and doors. Seal leaks between moving parts (between door and frame) with weather stripping. Fill leaks between nonmoving parts (between window frame and wall) with caulking.
• "Insulate" yourself from price shocks. Appropriate insulation for your climate based on R-values can increase your comfort and reduce your heating costs up to 30 percent. Start with attic insulation, followed by exterior and basement walls, floors, and crawl spaces. Insulate and seal attic air ducts. www.simplyinsulate.com.
• Upgrading inefficient windows, glass doors, or skylights? Ask your supplier for energy-efficient Energy Star windows with double panes and low-emissivity coatings to increase comfort this winter. In cold climates, such windows can reduce your heating bills by 34 percent, compared to uncoated, single-pane windows. www.efficientwindows.org.
• Refinancing your home or obtaining a home equity loan to remodel? The big news is home decorating and remodeling. Consider wrapping in energy-efficiency home improvements to your refinancing package. Interest could be tax deductible, and you could reduce your monthly energy bills comfortably.

Next Improve How You Heat Your Home

• "Tune up" your heating system. Heating can account for almost half of the average family's winter energy bill. Make sure your furnace or heat pump receives a professional “tune-up” each year. Clean or replace air filters in your forced air heating system once a month to help your unit run more efficiently.
• Forget to lower the heat when you leave home for the day? Or tired of awakening to a chilly bedroom? A programmable thermostat will remember for you. It will automatically coordinate your home temperature with your daily and weekend patterns to increase comfort and monetary savings.
• Let the sunshine in to help heat your home. Keep blinds or drapes of sun-exposed windows open in the daytime and closed at night to conserve heat. Close unoccupied areas and reduce heat. Close the damper on fireplaces when not in use.
• Cut your energy bills by 30 percent. Look for the Energy Star label, the symbol for energy efficiency, when replacing your heating and cooling systems – as well as appliances, lighting, windows, insulation, and home electronics. Find retailers near you at www.energystar.gov.

Light Up Your Life – Efficiently

• Fire hazard. Popular halogen torchiere lamps are relatively inexpensive to purchase but are expensive to operate and can cause fires. Consider safer, more efficient Energy Star torchiere lamps instead.
• Don't like coming home to a dark house on short winter days? Instead of leaving lights on, put timers on a few of the lights in your home, or install motion detectors and daylight sensors. Motion detectors on exterior floodlights improve your home security at a lower operating cost.
• 4 for the planet. Replacing four 75-watt incandescent bulbs with 23-watt fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) that use about two-thirds less energy and last up to 10 times longer saves $190 over the life of the bulbs. If all our nation’s households did the same, we’d save as much energy as is consumed by some 38 million cars in one year.
• Your mother was right. (“What do you think — we own the power company?!”) Turn off everything not in use: lights, TVs, computers.

Think Spring and Tap Free Resources

• Think “warm” thoughts – steaming apple cider, hot chocolate, and how you'll be sweltering again next summer and dealing with big air conditioning bills if you don't plug the air leaks in your home.
• Free Alliance to Save Energy resources. Obtain a free booklet, Power$mart: The Power Is in Your Hands, and visit the Alliance Consumer Web site.
• Free Department of Energy resources. Obtain a free booklet, Energy Savers: Tips on Saving Energy and Money at Home, in English or Spanish by calling 1-877-337-3463 or online and view an animated version at www.energysavers.gov.
• Free Environmental Protection Agency resources. Obtain a free copy of Guide to Energy-Efficient Cooling and Heating which is available at www.energystar.gov from the heating and cooling product pages or by calling 1-888-STAR-YES (1-888-782-7937). Download the ENERGY STAR Action Guide 5 Steps You Can Take to Reduce Air Pollution.
• Free booklet for New Yorkers: It's Right. . . and Right at Home, a brochure with energy-saving tips. Contact 877.NY-SMART (877.697.6278) or residential@nyserda.org. For more tips, visit www.GetEnergySmart.org, the consumer web site of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA).