With days growing shorter and shorter and the temperatures plummeting further downwards, it can only mean one thing. It’s time to get ready for the winter, and it’s time to make sure that your home can brace the cold. Seasons seem to be changing with more brutal winters and fiercer summers lately, so you need to take as many steps as necessary to repair your home for the cold weather. This is not just about comfort any more, but it’s essential for your wallet too.
Getting your house ready for winter is going to be a game changer for you and your family, so you need to ensure that you are prepped in advance. From stocking the outdoor shed with the best electric snow blowers and shovels, to making sure you have a decent stock of salt that works with ice, you need to get winter ready as soon as possible. With our tips below, you can prepare your home for the cold in no time at all.
- Upgrade your insulation. Ensuring that your home is well insulated is just good sense for cold weather. Adding insulation into the uninsulated areas such as crawl spaces, attics and floors will ensure that you can save up to 20% on your home’s heating and cooling costs. If you ensure that you check for drafts around windows and doors and you look at the weather stripping you currently have to add more, you can stop the heated air inside from escaping and the cold air from outside from making its way in.
- Call in the HVAC professionals. Servicing your heating system is an absolute must before the winter truly does set in. Over the festive period, you’ll hopefully be stuffing your house full of relatives so it won’t feel so cold, but getting your heating system maintained properly before then is important. Having a HVAC specialist come in and service your cooling system will mean that when the winter does hit and you turn the heating on, you’re not going to find yourself shivering in a coat inside because the heating is just going to work the way it should.
- Do a check of all of your windows. If you are dealing with older single pane windows, you’ll probably want to upgrade to an energy efficient double pane window at some stage. If you’re living in a particularly cold area, you could even upgrade to a triple pane window and really keep the heat going. If windows are not in the budget right now, there are plenty of ways that you can block drafts so that you don’t have to worry about cold air seeping through.
- Turn ceiling fans to the correct mode. If you have ceiling fans that you use in the summer to cool the rooms, you can simply flip the switch the other way and make the rooms feel warmer in the winter. Ceiling fans can push the warm air downward to make the room feel cosier, rather than making you feel cooler. You can even add heat and air deflectors to vents throughout your home so that they can direct the warm air downward too.
- Get your roof prepared. Clogged gutters can allow water to back up into the roof and freeze. Not only will this damage the roof, but it will form ice dams in the walls which can cause mold later on. By having roofing experts come out to clean the gutters and the downspouts before the winter weather comes in. You’ll ensure that your roof isn’t going to be a problem with the weight of the snow and the cold air this winter.
- Take good care of your pipes. Frozen pipes are a homeowner’s worst nightmare because when pipes freeze and then they burst, they cause extensive water damage and repairs that could cost a lot more money than you’d ever budgeted for. You want to keep the pipes from freezing, so wrap the exposed pipes with insulation or add heat cables to keep the water flowing. This will be the case even on the coldest of days.
- Find the gaps and cracks. Checking for gaps and cracks in the walls, floors and foundations of the house is something you should be doing twice a year at the minimum. Where cable wires or pipes enter the home, especially these areas need to be sealed with caulk or weather stripping to keep cold air out.
Save yourself some time and money by preparing your home for winter in advance. Don’t be left in the cold.
