3 Steps to Weatherize Your Home this Winter
When it’s frosty out, it’s especially enjoyable to enter a nice, warm home. Unfortunately, the cold air you’re trying to leave behind can find its way in, too, through cracks and gaps in your home’s envelope, which can lower your home’s energy-efficiency and make for higher heating bills. The good news is, you can do something about it. With the help of your HEAT USA dealer, you can transform your home into the Fort Knox of energy-efficiency, where no cold air gets in and no warm air gets out. Start with these three steps:
- Schedule a Home Energy Audit
Many HEAT USA dealers perform home energy audits to help you pinpoint where you’re losing energy and what you can do to fix it. A certified, highly-trained professional will thoroughly inspect your home using advanced diagnostic equipment to assess its energy-efficiency, as well as health and safety issues, and provide a detailed report. According to Energy.gov, by making efficiency upgrades identified in a home energy audit, you can save up to 30 percent on your energy bill.
- Seal Your Home’s Envelope
Warm air can escape and cold, drafty air can enter your home through cracks or gaps in windows, doors, walls and floors. When it does, your heating system is forced to work harder to produce the same amount of warmth in your home. In the summer, those gaps allow the heat to get in and your air conditioned air out. The EPA estimates that, on average, homeowners save 11 percent on their total energy costs by air sealing their homes. Install weather stripping on doors and caulk around windows, and ask your HEAT USA dealer to help you identify other energy-efficiency solutions.
- Insulate Your Hot Water Pipes
When water freezes, it expands and can put pressure on your hot water pipes, causing them to burst. You can help prevent this from happening by protecting your pipes with insulation sleeves, wrapping, or foam pipe insulation. Insulated hot water pipes decrease heat loss, and can keep the water inside 2-4 degrees warmer than uninsulated pipes, per Energy.gov. As an additional measure, leave a faucet slowly dripping so that water continues to move freely in your pipes.
Fortify your home and make it the Fort Knox of energy-efficiency by contacting a HEAT USA dealer. If you’re not yet a member, contact us today to learn all the ways you can improve your comfort and savings by becoming one.
