Keeping your home heated and saving money this winter

Keeping your home warm can be difficult and costly during winter. The key is, not losing heat from your home. This will save you money.

“Make sure your envelope is sealed tight,” Wid Ritchie, Energy Products and Services Manager for Idaho Falls Power, said. “Especially, we’re predicted to have some very cold temperatures this next week. You just wanna make sure you’re keeping the heat inside the home.”

The type of thermostat can also make a difference in savings. Older models can be off by as much as plus or minus five degrees.

“They’re relatively inaccurate and they just get worse over time,” Tony Allen, Energy Specialist for Idaho Falls Power said. “So, we encourage people to go with a digital display thermostat that’s more accurate so you can control your temperature. And the thing that you see happens a lot with people is they go around and they set them all to the same temperature, but one may be set to 60 degrees or one’s actually set to 70 degrees and so it doesn’t efficiently heat the home. Where if you can control that more accurately it helps you just control your heating and keep your comfort level up.”

Make sure your windows are closed, doors are shut and curtains are closed to keep the heat inside your home.

“Your windows and doors tend to be leaky spots that you can look for air that’s actually passing through here,” Allen said. “Doors, you can add weather stripping to help seal that up. Windows, if you’ve got leaking air coming through the windows it’s good to do whatever you can to get that to stop whether that be a plastic film or something in the winter.”

Little things can make a difference.

“I would always just make sure lights are turned off,” Ritchie said. “There’s many times you can drive down the street in the middle of the day and you see someone’s porch light on and they just don’t realize they’ve left it on.”

Comfort is a big factor in deciding what temperature is right for your house, but make sure you are only heating rooms that you actually use.

“If there’s spaces you aren’t using for extended periods of time, it does make sense,” Ritchie said. “Turn those spaces down, isolate them from the other areas so that you aren’t heating spaces you’re not using. It can help save on power.”

The Idaho Falls Power company does do energy audits, where they’ll come to your apartment or house and see where you are losing heat and money.