When winter arrives and you start feeling the chill in your Columbus or Athens apartment or rental house, you can save yourself both money and comfort by taking some simple steps to prepare for and survive the long Ohio winter.
Some of these tips are unique to houses. And some especially apply to student neighborhoods with older homes that may not be properly winterized. Other suggestions may be more suited to apartments.
Stay Comfortable (and Save Money) This Winter
• Manage your thermostat. If you have an old-school manual thermostat in your house or apartment in Columbus or Athens, don’t just set one temperature and forget about it. Get in the habit of turning it down several degrees every night before you go to bed. If you’re like most people, you sleep better in the winter when lying snugly under several blankets. You can’t do that when the furnace is heating the house to 75F all night (plus you’ll break the furnace that way).
• Manage the thermostat part 2. If you and your apartment or house-mates expect to be gone all day, turn down the thermostat before you leave. There’s absolutely no reason to heat an abandoned house for eight hours every day. Turn the heat back on when you get home. Or ideally, your Athens or Columbus student rental has a programmable thermostat where you can program a series of daily energy-saving settings and forget about it.
• Manage the thermostat part 3. Consider using a lower temperature setting for normal daytime and evening hours when the house or apartment is occupied. Just give 68 degrees a try, rather than 70, 72 or 74. You might find that you become accustomed to the lower temperature setting. If you’re still chilly, throw on an extra layer of clothing. This can save you abundant bucks on your gas and/or electric bills.
• Manage the thermostat part 4. If you have house or apartment mates, have a quick meeting to establish who has the responsibility to manage the thermostat, either all the time or week to week. You definitely want to avoid a situation where two or three people are constantly changing the setting.
• Close the damn door! You probably know this one by heart, thanks to your mom’s repeated exhortations as you were growing up. When it’s cold outside and doors or windows are open for any length of time, heat escapes the house. Which means the house gets colder. Elementary, my dear Watson!
• Close doors to unused rooms and shut the heating registers or vents in those rooms. The less space your central heating system has to service, the more efficiently (and cheaply) it can heat the rest of the house. However, there’s one caveat to this. If you close up too much of the house, your furnace or heat pump likely will short-cycle. This means it quickly heats the “open” parts of the house, then shuts down. It stops and starts time after time, which itself wastes energy and stresses the equipment. So in general, it’s OK to block heat to one or two bedrooms but not an entire floor.
• Seal those leaks. In a lot of homes, especially older houses, there are numerous places where heat can escape (or enter during the summer). The result is that your heating system must work harder than necessary to make the residence comfortable. Over time, the resulting energy waste can add up to a big expense. Plus it will prematurely age the heating and cooling equipment that’s overworking itself to replace heat that’s being lost to the outside. You can test the seal in your rental by walking along the inside of exterior walls with a lighted candle. When the flame flickers or wavers, that’s likely because of a nearby air leak. Really, it should be your landlord’s responsibility to make sure the home is properly weatherized. However, you can always take matters into your own hands by utilizing caulk, weather-stripping or spray foam to seal air leaks in a house. Likely spots include window and doors, areas where building materials join each other, the attic hatch or door, and places where utility pipes or lines penetrate the walls of the house.
• Save yourself some trouble. Find a landlord who will pay the utilities. If you’re lucky enough to find someone like this, you may be tempted to say the hell with worrying about heating bills; let’s keep the heat at 75 all winter. However, please don’t do this, since it’s not that comfortable to be sweating all the time. More importantly, it will reveal you as an irresponsible citizen of the world, someone who wantonly contributes to energy waste and climate change, just for your own personal comfort.