Winter is coming. These three words can send a chill up your spine when you think about the added energy and utility costs that you could be facing in the coming months. But fear not: there are some simple steps you can take to improve your home efficiency and save you money.
Keep in mind: weatherizing your home isn’t just reserved for the colder months. Taking these steps can set you up for success and keep your home’s environmental impacts low all year long. And if money is part of what’s holding you up, consider the Mass Save program, which offers invaluable rebate incentives to take advantage of when it comes to purchasing and installing weatherization items like insulation, doors, and windows.
Let’s take a deeper dive into different weatherization tips and tactics that you can leverage to help improve your home efficiency.
Conduct a Home Energy Assessment
The first step any homeowner should take is conducting a home energy assessment. Where are you using more energy than you need to, and where are your opportunities to achieve optimal efficiency? Knowing where you can make improvements ensures that your house is ready to be converted off of fossil fuel systems.
To ensure that you maximize the discounts and rebates available for clean energy transition projects, the assessment needs to be done by a qualifying professional. Gridly is able to connect you with an energy assessment professional and provide recommendations about where you might be able to improve your home efficiency.
Weatherizing and Insulating Your Home
As we said, weatherizing and insulating your home will reduce your environmental impact and help save you money in the long run. An important thing to note is that these efforts work best when they are done together. Though taking any of these steps will improve your home efficiency, you may want to consider implementing as many as you can for maximum effectiveness.
Air Sealing Your Home
Whether you’re cooling or heating your home, the last thing you want is for it to be escaping through cracks or openings that you might not even be aware of. Air sealing your home stops this from happening.
Though you can caulk or weatherstrip doors and windows to prevent air leaks, you may also consider upgrading your windows if they are old, single-pane construction. This saves you time and money in the long run and can be a more permanent solution.
Common places throughout your home that might benefit from air sealing include:
- Attics
- Porch roofs
- Ducts
- Staircases placed on an exterior wall
- Flue or chimney shafts
- Whole-house fans
- Ducts
Again, you can either hire a professional to do this work for you or you can do it yourself.
Adding Insulation
Even if you’ve sealed all the leaks in your home, this effort alone won’t improve your home efficiency. That’s why installing insulation is just as important, keeping the air that you heated or cooled in your home.
There are some weaker points throughout your home that could benefit from a little insulation, like your garage or attic. Though these places might be air sealed, your heating or cooling systems might have to work overtime trying to get these spaces to match the temperature throughout the rest of your home. Insulating your home will limit this heat flow and keep your costs down.
Controlling Moisture
Two places where moisture can build up in your home are your foundation and your walls. For the former, you should make sure that there are no cracks, holes, or any other tiny openings in your basement. This often requires a professional to come in and seal things up. Similar steps can be taken for your walls. Not only will this keep water from seeping in, but it will also protect the durability of your walls.
Not only will this help with your home efficiency and energy costs, but this practice will also improve the overall health and safety of your space as well. Moisture leads to mold, which can impact your quality of life if left untreated.
Ventilating Your Space
There are three different ways to ventilate your home:
- Natural ventilation, which is the uncontrolled air movement in and out of your home. Open those windows when the weather is nice!
- Spot ventilation, which removes indoor moisture and/or air pollutants at their source. Examples of this would be exhaust vans in your kitchen or bathroom.
- Whole-house ventilation, which (as the name suggests) provides controlled, uniform ventilation throughout your entire home.
Each of these systems have varying degrees of effectiveness when it comes to cooling your home or improving your air quality, so make sure to do your research and consult with an expert to see what might work best for your home.
Gridly Makes Going Green Easier
Looking to add home renewable energy systems to your home in conjunction with your weatherization and insulation tactics? Gridly’s network of experts are here to help you determine what resources can best suit your home or project. We can also help you understand what rebates and incentives you have available to you from such places as Mass Save, which will help take some of the chill out of figuring out how to afford your investment. Contact us today to learn more about the options available for you.
