By Heather Listhartke
With winter comes the holidays and memorable times with family and friends, but it also brings uncomfortable temperatures. Just as we get cold, so do our homes and a house can actually be damaged if it isn’t properly winterized for the coming weather. Here’s a list of relatively easy and cheap things you can do to winterize your home against the cold.
For the outside of your house:
Remove dead tree limbs or trees from your yard. Just the right kind of winter weather paired with the cold, brittle, dead trees or tree limbs can make for a lot of significant damage that could have been prevented. Middle Tennessee is known to get freezing rain in the winter. When rain freezes on tree limbs, the limbs become heavy with ice and sometimes snow and they can break easily.
The other, small but helpful thing to do in order to protect your pipes from freezing is to shut off all your outdoor spigots, sprinkler systems, and any other water related outdoor things, and cover them. By doing so, you not only prevent major damage to the spigots and systems themselves, but you protect the pipes from freezing. In the long run, it saves you water and hundreds of dollars in potential repairs.
For the inside of your house:
Before you use your chimney this season, call a chimney sweep. You’ll want to make sure it is clean and clear for you to start up your fireplace safely. Without the proper ventilation or care, you could cause serious damage to your house or even start a fire that would end up in a major loss. This is one of the most common reasons for house fires throughout the year, so make sure you’re checking everything properly to prevent your house from damage.
Also, make an appointment for a heating and air conditioning fall/winter tune-up and maintenance. If you’re heater isn’t working right, there often is no obvious signs that there is something wrong until you get your electric bill. If something is wrong with your heater, the result could be an extremely high electric bill. You can save a lot of money and headache and get it checked. Also, continue to change those filters regularly.
Add extra insulation, such as weather stripping on your door ledges, caulk around your windows and doors, insulate your piping, or other necessary things to reduce drafts and keep the warm air inside. The combination of doing any of these things can mean a drastic reduction in the amount of energy you could be using to keep your house warm, especially if it is an older house.
Finally, run your ceiling fans in reverse; fans aren’t just for keeping you cool.Most ceiling fan units now come with a handy switch that allows you to reverse the direction of the blade movement. While counterclockwise rotation produces cooling breezes, by switching to clockwise rotation, you’ll actually be making your house warmer as the warm air pooled near the ceiling is circulated back into the living space. This will end up cutting your heating costs as much as 10 percent!
There are many more things that you can do to winterize your house, especially if you have an older house. It all depends on the condition of your doors, windows, space around piping, and the condition of your roofing. If any of these things are outdated, you could be spending hundreds of dollars in extra electricity usage. If you end up deciding to upgrade any of these things, you could end up not only saving in electricity costs, but could also be eligible for a tax deduction under the energy savings act.
This article was brought to you by Classic Doors. Visit their website or see them in person at 319 Hermitage Ave.
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