Winterizing Your Home

Winter in the Midwest, as we all know, can really be hit or miss, making it difficult to prepare for inclement weather. You can easily bundle up in a heavy coat, gloves, and fuzzy socks when the temperature significantly drops. Your home, however, is a bit more complex. Frozen pipes, leaky windows, and power outages are just some of the joys that frigid temperatures bring. It’s important to take steps to winterize your home as temperatures drop to protect your home from maintenance nightmares and sky-high electric bills. Don’t let the cold affect you this winter, keep your home nice and cozy with these simple tips!

1. Seal Any Leaks

Keep drafts to a minimum this year by sealing any areas with a leak. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, small leaks in your home can decrease your energy efficiency by 5-30 percent per year. It pays to take a few minutes to check for small cracks around your windows and seal them up with caulking or weather-stripping. If you have pipes or ducts that travel through an exterior wall, use weather strips around all points of entry.

Sealing your windows is not only an easy, cost-effective way to prevent cold air from coming inside your home; it also balances the surface temperature of your windows. This ensures that condensation doesn’t build up, which is more likely to happen in the wintertime when your heat is cranked at full blast.

2. Let Your Faucets Drip

Letting your water drip continually prevents your pipes from freezing because moving water freezes slower than standing water. If the water in your pipes moves continuously, even from a teeny tiny drop, it can prevent them from freezing and potentially bursting.

Don’t fret about letting every single faucet drip. The pipes that are closest to the exterior of your home are the ones to worry about! If you find the faucet that is farthest away on the pipe’s path, let that one drip. Why? Because this way you can keep the water moving along the longest length of pipe.

We also recommend removing your hose from any faucets. Water that’s left inside your hose bib can freeze and split the copper hose bib open, which creates leaks on the inside wall of your home when warmer weather comes back around in the spring. This is one of the most common warranty calls we receive in the early springtime. While we do love coming over to see our homeowners, we’d rather you not have to deal with issues like this in your home!

3. Close Your Garage Doors

Keep this tip in mind if you have water supply lines that go through your garage. While we all want your pets to have a place to escape the cold, leaving your door cracked can cause more harm than good. Having your garage door open creates a draft that can freeze the water in your HVAC closet drain. The next time you are doing a load of laundry, the water will have nowhere to drain and could begin to flood your garage or even the inside of your home. Be sure to keep an eye on the nighttime temperatures and keep those doors closed so that the plumbing within your garage is protected from drafts that can cause freezing.

4. Insulate Your Attic

Remember back in middle school science class where we learned that heat naturally rises? Well, that’s the concept with insulating your home – especially your attic or crawl space! Insulation prevents heat from exiting your home in the winter and entering your home in the summer. Lots of heat can get lost through uninsulated, or under-insulated areas in your attic – so pay attention to empty corners or shallow areas where insulation didn’t settle correctly. While not as cost friendly as the steps listed above, insulating your home has the longest return on your investment and will keep you toasty all winter long!

5. Heat It and Leave It

A huge reason for energy inefficiency is setting your thermostat to fluctuating temperatures. The best practice for maximum energy efficiency is to find a setting where you are comfortable, set your thermostat and don’t touch it again.

If the temperate drops extremely low, electric heaters have an “emergency heat” option that you can switch to – but be careful when using this setting! Emergency heat is only meant to be used as a short-term solution to get your electric heater caught back up when outside temperatures are lower than normal. If used for extended periods of time, you could be looking at a steep electric bill.

You can also try flipping your ceiling fans to reverse. Changing the direction of the blades pools the warm air from the ceiling and recirculates it into the room. This trick could cut your heating costs up to 10 percent, just don’t forget to switch it back when the weather warms back up!

There are several things that you can do to weatherproof your home during the wintertime, and these steps are sure to get you ahead of the game. Cold weather can become quite the calamity if you don’t take the right precautions for your home. Winterizing your home is worth the trouble and now is the perfect time to get it taken care of.