Become A Draft Dodger! 12 Frugal Ways to Cut Heating Costs

We have home without a cellar, only a crawl space. We also have a portion of the living room (facing the south/west side) that is built out over an open space. This resulted in a very cold living room floor especially when winter winds blow. These are the changes I made to rectify the problem:

1. The first change was to remove the expensive and inadequate electric wallboard heater in the living room and kitchen with a Rennai gas heaters.

This eaqualizes the heat throughout the house zones.
2. We removed the wallboard heater in the Master bedroom
3. We installed 3 ceiling fans with light fixtures to circulate the heat in winter and dissipate the heat in summer. This compensates for the missing heater in the master bedroom when the door is kept open in the winter during the day. We still have electric wallboard heaters in the two smaller bedrooms but never use them. We retained the floor heater in the bathroom to speed up early morning warm up but do not use it otherwise.

4. The next necessity was to have a carpenter install rigid foam insulation beneath the livingroom floor on the exposed end.

5. We rolled out two layers of 4 mill plastic throughout the crawl spaces which keeps both the cold and moisture down. This helped tremendously in reducing the cold through the floors of the two small bedrooms which are closer to the ground than the rest of the house.

6. I created a triple layer of temporary winter insulation around the open end of the living room base by inserting 1X1 strips into the ground just beneath the lip of the house to act as a back support for 2" rigid foam insulation cut to fit directly below the base. I followed up with running a skirting of aluminum Reflectix Aluminum insulated foil with bubble wrap in the middle. I kept @ 3 inches on the bottom that folds outward at a 45 degree angle to provide a base for anchoring in winter winds. All the tools needed are a hammer for the 1 x 1; an exacto blade to cut the foam insulation; a staple gun and a pair of scissors to cut the aluminum. I covered the aluminum foil with two inexpensive vinyl table cloths purchased at Walmart that match my house colors so it doesn't look tacky. Finally, I used my cement flower boarders to anchor the whole thing down for winter winds and it also provides a preventive barrier for when we use our snow scoops after each storm so there is no tearing of the insulation. It's held up fine. Removal takes @ 10 minutes in spring and we are toasty.

My family lives in a very small house, a 2 br ranch which believe it or not saves money in itself. We can close off the bedrooms until about an hour or two before bed. We use the sun to keep our electricity bill down by making use of mostly natural light. Several years ago, we installed new energy efficient windows and a skylight. These windows have reduced our energy bill tremendously, even though the initial expense is high. Our heating bill is around $50 a month and we keep the thermostat at 70 most of the time. In the basement, we use room sized rugs, to keep the floors comfortable enough to tread on barefoot. We use the rooms according to the months of the year, staying upstairs mostly in the winter and staying cool downstairs in the summer. We also shut our heat off as soon as the nights are about 60 degrees.