For most homeowners, ensuring their home feels warm throughout the winter is a top priority. While many invest heavily in HVAC systems or furnaces, another effective strategy is to ensure your home is properly insulated.
Proper insulation can significantly affect how warm and comfortable your home feels, even if it is poorly insulated.
However, if your home’s insulation is subpar, making you feel cold even indoors, you’ll need to consider various strategies to keep a poorly insulated house warm. Addressing these issues can transform a chilly living space into a cozy retreat during the colder months.
How To Keep A Poorly Insulated House Stay Warm
- Install Window Blinds.
Install Window Blinds. When you want to increase the insulation in your home, especially if it feels cold due to poor insulation, starting with the windows is a wise move. Window blinds can trap cool air during summers and retain warmth in winters, helping to make your home feel more comfortable.
Window blinds can trap cool air during summers and retain warmth in winters, helping to reduce your heating bill.
Even with the windows closed, 40% of warm air escapes via exposed windows, causing the house to become chilly. Installing window coverings is the greatest technique to stop hot air from running through a room.
- Use Heavy Curtains to Block the Draft.
Use Heavy Curtains to Block the Draft. Alternatively, heavy curtains can act as a draft stopper, providing an additional insulation layer.
This is particularly effective in homes that are not properly insulated, as it helps to keep the warm air inside, reducing the cold feel of the rooms. This is particularly effective in cold rooms where drafts are more noticeable.
Additionally, heavy drapes will act as a barrier between the warm air within the house and the chilly air outside the window, improving your home’s insulation against the cold.
- Use Door Sweeps.
Typically, Create door sweeps use nylon or another waterproof material. They keep the cold air from entering the room and are permanently affixed to the door. Door sweeps to keep out pests are more effective than covering the aperture with a towel or cloth.
- Invest In a Quality HVAC System.
The next step to keeping a poorly insulated house warm is to employ technology to regulate the temperature if your home isn’t constructed with natural insulation. Invest in a heating and cooling system that uses energy efficiently while maximizing warmth.
Most heating systems are inefficient and need to be adjusted often to function. Your home will remain at the ideal temperature, and you won’t lose heat with a sound HVAC system.
- Insulate The Roof
Insulate The Roof. Inadequate roof insulation is common in homes that feel cold due to poor insulation. Addressing this can significantly reduce heat loss, making your home feel warmer and more comfortable, even during the coldest months. You can save money in the long run, as it significantly reduces heat loss.
While you may try to keep your home warm in various ways, installing roof insulation is an excellent long-term option. Insulating the roof, which may reduce heat loss by up to 15%, may drastically alter the interior temperature.
Although there are several options for roof insulation, foam insulation or fiberglass insulation is often more efficient. Compared to other insulation, foam insulation is less expensive, simpler to install, and maintenance-free.
Read also: Recommended Insulation for Flat Roof without Attic
How To Trap Heat In House
Consider using a ceiling fan to redistribute warm air that rises to the ceiling, especially in rooms with high ceilings. Reversing the fan’s direction can push warm air down, improving the overall warmth of the room.
Additionally, remember to close interior doors to unused rooms to prevent the spread of cold air and concentrate the heat in occupied spaces.
How To Keep House Warm Without Electricity
- Keep the Curtains Shut at Night
You can start to seem cooler as the night goes on since the temperature drops. Keeping the curtains closed while you sleep is a fantastic technique to maintain heat in your home without using energy.
By leaving the curtains open all night, you risk letting chilly air into your house through gaps in the windows or the glass itself. If your home has open windows with curtains, you can use towels or blankets to keep the chilly air out at night.
- Use the Fireplace & Candles
Using the fireplace is an economical option to keep your home warm if you lose power on a chilly night in spring. By flicking a switch, homeowners with gas fireplaces may quickly start a fire and start the combustion and heating process.
Families with conventional wood-burning fireplaces may also keep a fire going using the previously bought logs.
- Cook a Meal
By preparing a meal, you might be able to heat your home without electricity if there is a severe power outage in your neighborhood. Most families can prepare lunch or dinner during an outage because house gas ovens are standard.
Your oven uses natural gas as way to keep the house warmer when it is in use to cook your meals. Cooking could be advantageous for heating a house without electricity or the extra heat energy we throw into the kitchen throughout the heating cycle.
- Close the Doors of Unused Rooms
It’s crucial to keep your doors closed in empty rooms since cold air might enter your home through cracks near windows in your bedrooms. By doing this, the main living spaces, including the living room and kitchen, will remain warm and free of the frigid air from each bedroom.
Keeping your family together in one room is the best method to keep your house warm without electricity.
- Get the Entire Family in a Single Room
Even if it could be challenging, gathering your family in one area is necessary to heat the house without electricity. When you speak and breathe, your body generates a lot of heat.
So, being together in one room to conserve body heat is a great strategy to keep your family warm.
Read also: How to Insulate Windows for Summer
Bottom Line
When there is a power outage, there are several things you may do to keep yourself and your house warm. Always be extra cautious on how to keep a poorly insulated house warm, and make sure you never go to bed with an open flame still lighting while utilizing heat sources like open fires inside your home.