With energy prices higher than even, heating your home is becoming ever more expensive. It’s becoming difficult for many people to afford to keep warm. There are, however, things that you can do to keep warm without having to have the heating on.
Here are our tips for keeping warm when you can’t afford to keep the heating on over winter 2022.
Keep Yourself Warm Instead Of Your Home
When you use your heating, what you’re really trying to do is keep yourself warm. Instead of heating the house to keep yourself warm, insulate yourself to retain your own body heat. Wear warm, insulated clothing, including thermal underwear and thermal socks. Wear a hat and gloves, which will reduce loss of body heat.
Even better, buy some heated clothing! This is clothing with built in electrical heating powered by a battery pack. Although it does use energy, heated clothing uses far less energy than heating the whole house to keep yourself warm.
Limit The Parts Of Your Home That You Heat
Don’t heat the whole house. Instead turn off the heating in some rooms. If you have central heating with radiators, you can turn off individual radiators. This will make it cheaper to run the heating because you’re heating a smaller part of the house.
You could just heat one bedroom, and use that room for the majority of the time in the house. Don’t heat rooms that you don’t spend a lot of time in as. For example, if you heat a bedroom, you don’t need to heat the kitchen and bathroom. Wear warm clothes when you go to the toilet, or go to get food from the kitchen.
Make Sure That Heat Isn’t Wasted
There are various ways that heat is easily lost from a room Reduce these as much as possible to retain heat in the room.
Seal any gaps in window frames that drafts can get through with tape. Use draft excluders at the bottom of doors to stop drafts coming through the small gap under the door. Don’t seal every single source of ventilation though, you still need some air circulation!
Heat is lost quickly through glass. Even double glazed windows still allow a lot of heat to escape from a room. Keep curtains closed to reduce the amount of heat lost through windows. If your curtains are thin, hang blankets over the window too.
Uninsulated, hard flooring such as stone, tile or lino can also drain heat from a room. Carpet works as an insulation layer, which allows heat to be retained in the room. Cover hard floors with rugs to add an extra layer of insulation and retain heat in the room.
Don’t Be Afraid To Use Warm Hubs
Warm hubs are warm places available to members of the public to keep warm. If you are struggling to keep yourself warm at home, do not be afraid to spend time in a warm hub. Libraries are a good place to warm up during the day, but there are plenty of others.
Check out warmwelcome.uk to search for warm hubs near you. Bear in mind that there may be other places not listed there too.
The ukprepper.life family are UK preppers who love to be prepared for everything, from the minor day to day emergencies, all the way to major disasters and more. Between us we have many years of experience prepping, and we’d love to share our experiences with you.
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