Have You Turned on the Heat Yet?

When I bake something in the oven, I leave the oven door open when I am done its a good use of the heat while it cools down.

Leave the oven door open after cooking. Its a good use of the heat as it cools down

I live in Phoenix AZ where the heat is always on! We don’t much use the heat in the winter but those summer A/C bills yikes!!!!!! I am glad it is cooling off a night so I don’t have to coll down my house!!!!

We don’t turn our heat above 60 (we usually keep it at 58 – 60 is for those biting cold, 20 degree outside days). Yup, it’s cold, but we also make sure we dress appropriately. We wear long sleeved shirts, sweaters, and if needed, a hat. It also encourages you to keep moving – you don’t sit around like a lump in 58 degrees – you need to be up and doing something.

We have electric blankets on all of the beds. I stocked up on replacements last May when Walmart had them on markdown for $10. On really cold nights we sleep with knit caps on. Each bathroom has a small heater that hangs on the wall using the plug-in prongs for support, so we only heat the bathrooms for the time it takes to shower and dress. We have friends who sleep in their sleeping bags on cold nights. Their bags are rated to -20 degrees, so they are probably as warm as we are in electric blankets.
I also have a pair of fingerless gloves that i wear around house on really cold days. Probably look like a bag lady to the neighbors!

We have a large house (2100′), so we utilize a wood stove and corn stove. With propane prices the way they are right now, our corn stove paid for itself in two years. The wood stove was already in the house when we bought it. We just purchased an adapter for our corn stove so that we can burn wood pellets in it. This year, we spent 350 on wood pellets (bought them when they went on sale 175 per ton) and this will last us the winter. If we were to run propane all winter as our only heat source, it would cost us around 2940. We spend one day a month cutting, splitting, and stacking wood in our two covered trailers. Great tradeoff!!! No we haven’t turned on our heater–the only time we will is when we are out of town (very rarely!)

Our corn stove paid for itself in 3 months worth of propane, not two years.—Sorry!

We have double glass slider windows and we put clear plastic on the inside of all of them using channel lock strips that remain on the window frame for years (not those temporary adhesive strips that often peel off). When I put the back of my hand against the clear plastic surface in the middle of the window it feels room temperature. If yours feels cold, you’re loosing heat. It takes a little work to get the plastic fitted so that there is no distortion looking out the window but it is worth the effort. It is possible to reuse the very clear shrink plastic year after year, just don’t use a blow dryer to shrink it, get it fitted smooth instead.

We also vent our clothes dryer indoors during heating season. That pumps a lot of hot air into the house along with much needed humidity. NOTE – YOU CAN ONLY DO THIS WITH AN ELECTRIC DRYER, GAS DRYERS VENT FUMES. I made a 4″ diameter 1 foot long tube out of window screen with a cap on the end that is attached to the dryer vent inside the house to catch any lint that makes it through the dryer’s screen. In the spring, I just reattach the dryer to the outdoor vent.

HEATER ON? Oh my goodness, I would love to say I resisted the urge to turn on the heater! Here in Sou Ca it was 99 degrees yesterday. I had the (evaporative) cooler on. Yes, I am very tired of this weather!

I have moved into a older home which is more drafty I make sure that all my doors have good
weather strips and put thick backed curtains
to keep heat loss from windows. Keep blankets
on couches while watching TV and socks on your
feet drink something warm that always seems to warm me up. Oh and leaving the oven door open after use that I do also really is wasteful if you don’t.

Lived in New England now Florida. While in NE I shut off the gas furnace for the last 4 years and heated with a propane unit. Heating bills of $300 rather than $800.

MrHeater.com Big Buddy model approx $100

Uses one 20lb tank every 4 days (100 hours on low) 30 days / 4 = 7.5 propane tanks at $15 totalling $112.50 times 3 months is $350

Now this unit has three settings 4/9/18K BTUs.
The low setting will maintain your 65+ temp but will not reheat a 50 degree 800-1000 square foot space. To bring the heat back up the 18,000BTU high setting is needed for a couple of hours and uses 4 times the propane(like running 4 heaters on low).

However since this unit, although small, is on constantly , as opposed to the 100-150K main furnace running 10 minutes an hour, it can maintain quite a nice size area (try openning and closing adjacent room doors).

On warmer days nights and in early or late winter it was not used even for half the 24 hours.

You can leave your existing home furnace on and set to 45 degrees or whatever.

This, if appropriate, can save you a bundle in heating costs.

When I cook pasta, or really anything that I drain off the hot water from, I strain them over another pot, not down the drain — the heat from the water dissipates into the room and there is a small amout of evaporation which helps humidity. Why waste the heat you paid for by sending it down the drain?

I also added insulated drapes on the hot, southern side of our home, keeps cool in the summer and warm in the winter, very reasonable thru various online catalogs, like Plow and Hearth (machine washable too!).

A warm house is my incentive to cook most nights now! Using the oven really heats up my house, it’s amazing. And nourishing.

anne
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Last year was our first year in our “new” country 1800 sq ft ranch. I thought propane was less expensive than gas heat. Boy where we wrong! We went thru two tanks in one Winter!!! That’s when we decided that hubby was going to have two more “things to do” for the next season.

Hubby put in two wood burning stoves, and we are using the wood from down trees in our yard (and wood that has been acquired from family). The thermostat is set to 50 for the propane; however, the two wood burning stoves on each “wing” of the house keep us nice and toasty (sometimes too toasty at 74).

We have a little baseboard heater in our bedroom for when we sleep. When we wake up, we go and stoke the fires. It is a really great system we’ve come up with these past few weeks.

Last winter in the mid-west was brutally cold. In 2007-2008, my son and daughter-in-law heated their entire four bedroom house with three radiator type electric heaters. These are the ones with oil inside that you can buy most any where for around $50. Their highest electric bill was just over $100. The house was well insulated but there were no storms on any of the windows and they were very drafty as were the doors. They did cover the outside of the windows with plastic but there were still drafts on windy days. Many days, they only needed to ran one or two of the heaters because it was too warm in the house. I’d also recommend a product marked by several companies that is sometimes called “removable sealant”. It is a clear silicon based sealant that can come either in a tube like toothpaste or in a caulking gun cartridge. You squeeze it out (like toothpaste) and spread it with your finger around your windows where you feel drafts. It puts a STOP to drafty windows. When spring comes, you just peel it off (which is time consuming sometimes). For about $20 you can probably do your entire house.

We have nice double-paned Harvey replacement windows, but I’ve noticed on the North side of our house you can really feel the cold radiating in through the glass even though there’s no draft. Turns out, we should have invested in TRIPLE paned glass for the North side at our latitude.

Our old french door (which we haven’t gotten around to replacing yet) leaks like a sieve. We don’t use it in the winter, so we just seal it up with Mortite (a soft grey putty that is removable). It makes a huge difference in the draft, and come spring we simply peel off the Mortite and put the door back in service.

We bought a sheet of plexiglass for $30 and cut it to fit our skylights with a Xacto knife. Pre-drill the holes, screw it into your trim with wood screws and washers, and you’ve got an interior “storm” window which lets ambient light in without losing so much heat. A North-facing skylight in the bedroom has two “adjustable” shower curtain rods and a baby quilt to insulate it as it gets no sunlight in the winter (we weren’t the ones who put in a north-facing skylight).

We invested in an entire roll of that insulated “roman shade” material available at JoAnn fabrics with a 40% off coupon. It’s got a layer of white drapery lining fabric, a sheet of that silvery “space blanket” material, and then a thin layer of polyester quilt batting. You cut the shade to fit, add decorative fabric on the inside to match your decor, staple it to a board and add your own string and O-rings to make it into a blind (or use it sideways to make a set of drapes). You can add a magnetic strip inside the blind and another to your window to make it really seal well if you want. Haven’t covered every window in the house yet (am working on it) but I’ve noticed a big difference on windows I’ve covered so far.

You could probably make your own roman shades or insulated drapes (without coughing up as much money) by piecing together the component materials yourself or cutting up an old quilt to be your base. Walmart has space blankets in their camping section, and you can get drapery lining material and quilt batting anywhere. The “official” material is stitched every 4″ so it stays together and doesn’t pull apart.

My mom has but I turned it back off without telling her and she hasn’t complained about it yet. Good sign that we could have left it off longer.

We only put it on at night (since during the day we’re at work and the kids are at school) which helps somewhat. And on the weekends when we’re home, we use the fireplace a lot.

WOW, some of you are very lucky. We keep reptiles, so not only do I pay for my underfloor heat mat and heat lamps to run all year long, but we have to keep our house warm. The reptile room is always the warmest room in the house and where most of them live, but we have to turn on the heat as soon as the warm temps are over. Drafts in my house are deadly.

Space heaters for smaller spaces can get the room a few degrees warmer for a minor cost. If you keep the house a few degrees cooler overall, this can be a good economy. Best to buy one with a programmable temp gauge (so it can turn off when it hits 70 or so).

Similarly, a programmable thermostat is a great investment and something that doesn’t cost much or is hard to install. My Honeywell has a weekday and weekend settings and 4 time periods per day. I set to 62 at night, 68 in the early AM, 65 during the day, and 69 from 7-11.