Heating

Overview

• Use programmable thermostats
• Close draperies at night and on cloudy days and open them on sunny days.
• Use a sunny room as living space to read the paper or eat a meal on sunny, cold days.  Upholstered furniture will soak up the heat when placed in a sunny spot.
• Install your storm doors and windows.
• Seal doors with draft-reducing weather-stripping and door sweeps.
• Lower your thermostat to 18°C while you’re away during the day.
• Make sure your thermostat is located in the room you spend the majority of your time in and close off dampers in other rooms that are not used as frequently. In this way, you are heating the room that you spend the most time in.
• Use more blankets at night to keep your body warm enough without warming your whole home.
• Use an electric blanket or sheet.  Turn it on for 10 – 15 minutes before going to bed to warm it up.  Turn it off before you get into bed.
• Dress warmly.  Wear layers of clothing.  This insulates the air trapped between the layers.
• Clean or replace filters on furnaces every 1 – 3 months.
• Have your furnace serviced once a year from a qualified professional.
• Clean warm-air registers, baseboard heaters and radiators as needed; make sure they’re not blocked by furniture, carpeting or drapes.
• Bleed trapped air from hot-water radiators once or twice a season; if in doubt about how to perform this, call a professional.
• Place heat-resistant radiator reflectors between exterior walls and the radiators.
• Close any unoccupied rooms that are isolated from the rest of the house, and turn down the thermostat or turn off the heating for that room or zone.  However, do not turn the heating off if it adversely affects the rest of your heating system.  For example, if you heat your house with a heat pump, do not close the vents, this could harm the heat pump.
• Select energy-efficient equipment when buying new heating equipment.  Your contractor should be able to provide you with energy fact sheets for different types, models and designs to help you compare energy usage.

Solar

• Keep all south facing glass clean.
• Make sure that objects do not block the sunlight shining on concrete slab floors or heat-absorbing walls.
• Consider using insulating curtains to reduce excessive heat loss from large windows at night.

Fireplace

• If you use a gas fireplace in a room you spend a lot of time in, consider locating your furnace thermostat in this room since it will likely be the warmest room in the house.
• If you never use your fireplace, plug and seal the chimney flue.
• Keep your fireplace damper closed unless a fire is going.  Keeping the damper open is like keeping a 48” window wide open during the winter; it allows warm air to go right up the chimney.
• When you use the fireplace, reduce heat loss by opening dampers in the bottom of the firebox (if provided) or open the nearest window slightly – approximately 1” and close doors leading into the room.  Lower the thermostat setting to between - 13° C.
• Install tempered glass doors and a hot-air exchange system that blows warmed air back into the room.
• Check the seal on the flue damper and make it as snug as possible.
• Add caulking around the fireplace hearth.
• Use grates made of C-shaped metal tubes to draw cool room air into the fireplace and circulate warm air into the house.

Task Heating

• Use task heating in areas of the home where you spend most of your time (such as downstairs), by using an approved and properly installed space heater.  Close the unoccupied rooms that are isolated from the warm zone and turn down the house’s central heating system to 13°C.  However, do not close off rooms so tightly that you prevent air from reaching gas-fueled water heaters, furnaces, ranges or other gas-fueled appliances.  This could create an unsafe build-up of carbon monoxide that can be fatal. You need to ensure those appliances are exposed to adequate air circulation.
• Make sure unused space gets enough heat in winter to prevent plaster from cracking or pipes from bursting.