7 Tips to Weather-Proofing Your Home During the Frigid Winter Months

If you haven’t gotten your home ready for winter yet, there’s no better time than the present to get started. During these frigidly cold months, you want to make sure that the air inside your home is set at a comfortable temperature. But you also want to make sure that you’re not paying for heat that’s inevitably going to escape your home. Unless you’ve properly sealed and weather-proofed your home, outdoor conditions will surely affect the indoors – as well as your pocket book.

Here are 7 ways to weather-proof your home so you can save energy and lower your utility bills.

1. Install Storm Doors

Storm doors are a great way to prevent a lot of heat escaping your home. Every time you open the front door, you let a blast of cold air in, and a waft of warm air out. Not only does this waste a lot of energy, but it also costs you a lot on your utility bills every month. Adding a storm door can do wonders at significantly reducing the amount of heat that is lost from your home.

2. Insulate the Outlets in Your Home

An electrical outlet is nothing more than a hole in the wall, which can be a source of heat loss in your home. Outlets that are old or not installed properly can be the cause of a ton of heat loss. Luckily, you can easily prevent this loss in energy by insulating your outlets. It’s a quick DIY fix that simply requires placing some foam around the outlets, which you can easily find at your local home improvement store.

3. Use Stoppers at the Bottom of Exterior Doors

There are tons of little nooks and crannies that energy will find to escape your home, and the bottom of the door is one of them. But you can stop any heat from seeping out of your home by placing stoppers at the bottom of each of your exterior doors. Not only will these stoppers prevent heat from escaping during the winter, but they can also come in handy in the other seasons of the year to reduce any dirt or pollen that might make their way into your home.

4. Caulk Any Drafty Doors and Windows

You might not realize it, but there may be cracks around your windows and doors that are actually causing energy to be lost. They might be so small that you don’t even notice them. If you can’t put your finger on why your monthly utility bills are always so high, it could be leaks around your doors and windows that might be to blame. In order to help you pinpoint these leaks, light a candle and slowly move it around your door and window frames. If there’s a draft, the flame will flicker. In this case, make sure to caulk these areas to prevent this heat loss from continuing.

5. Insulate Your Home’s Exterior Pipes

When the temperatures plummet in the winter, water expands. Any exposed water pipes outside of your home can become more vulnerable to freezing and cracking during the winter, causing unwanted leaky pipes and even a development of mold. To prevent this from happening, consider insulating these exterior pipes with foam covers or pipe insulation.

6. Insulate Your Water Heater

After you’ve insulated the pipes, consider insulating your home’s water heater too. A water heater insulation blanket is an effective and affordable way to shave a good chunk off your utility bill by saving a lot of lost heat through the sides of the tank. In fact, you can save as much as 40% of lost heat thanks to these cost-effective blankets!

7. Add Insulation to Your Attic and Basement

It’s not exactly cheap to insulate your attic or basement, but it can save you a ton of money in energy bills. The money you may be spending up front to properly insulate your home can easily be made up after about 5 or 6 years of consistent savings on your energy bill. Not only that, but having an insulated attic and basement also does wonders for the overall value of your home should you ever decide to sell in the future.

With so many simple and cost-effective things you can do to prevent heat from escaping and cold air from making its way in your home, there’s really no excuse for not giving at least one of them a try. Why waste your money paying off sky-high energy bills when you can put a lot of that money back in your pocket with a little weather-proofing? Taking some steps that won’t break the bank can not only lower your energy bills, but will benefit the environment too.