Home heating tips for Autumn and Winter
With a few smart energy savings habits and easy upgrades, you can make your home cosy, consistent, and efficient. From quick wins to long term solutions, here are the best home heating tips for saving energy while staying warm.
Keep the heat in
A few small tweaks can make your home feel cosier for longer and help your heating work smarter, not harder.
- Draw the curtains early. As soon as the sun goes down, close your curtains to trap the day’s warmth inside. Thermal or lined curtains are especially great for making rooms feel instantly cosier.
- Add a little DIY glazing. If you’ve got single-pane windows, a simple layer of secondary glazing film can make a surprising difference.
- Block the breeze. A classic draught excluder or rolled-up blanket under doors are great for trapping in the heat and maintaining more consistent temperatures .
- Warm up your entrance. Hanging a thermal curtain inside your front door helps keep the cold out each time it opens.
- Insulate for the long run. Loft, wall or floor insulation is one of the best investments you can make for lasting comfort and lower bills. For a deeper dive into insulation types, costs and savings, check out our ultimate insulation guide.
Make sure your boiler is working properly
Having your boiler serviced once a year is essential to keep it working safely and efficiently. This will reduce the chance of it breaking and leaving you without hot water, or having to use more energy than necessary to provide your heating.
If you are looking to upgrade your heating system, have you thought about installing an air source heat pump? We are a 5 star rated registered installer – you can get a quote in less than two minutes.
Find out how your heating controls work
Gas and oil central heating: Smart thermostats can help you to set a weekly schedule for your heating and hot water, that can be different every day of the week. If you know you work from home on a Friday – you could set your heating to be on more of the day. If you’re out all day on a Monday, a short blast morning and night would be plenty.
Electric storage heaters. Storage heaters use electricity at cheaper overnight rates to generate heat that is released the following day. Many types of storage heater are controlled using an ‘input’ and ‘output’ dial on top. The higher you turn the input dial, the more it will heat up, and the more electricity you’ll use. The higher you turn the output dial, the quicker the heat will be released. So, if you want your heat to last until the following evening, keep the output dial lower.
Find out more about how to use electric storage heaters.
Upgrade your radiator controls
For even greater control and comfort, thermostatic radiator valves enable you to vary temperatures between rooms in your home. These simple, low-cost devices replace your existing radiator knobs and let you set different heat levels in different spaces, so you’re not wasting energy warming empty rooms. Installation is quick for a heating engineer to do, often during a routine service, making it an easy efficiency upgrade with noticeable comfort benefits.
Reduce your boiler flow temperature
If you have a modern combi boiler, you may be able to set it to a lower flow temperature. This means that, rather than heating water to 70-80oC, you could heat it to 55-60oC and use less gas. This is a change you can do yourself – here’s a step-by-step guide to do so. However, we’d recommend confirming with a boiler technician if your system will still perform properly, as lower flow temperatures can make some older or smaller radiators less effective at heating your rooms.
Don’t drop your water temperature below 60oC if your system uses a hot water tank: your stored water must be regularly heated above this level to kill microbes.
Use less hot water
As well as cutting your water bills, reducing how much hot water you are using will also help you to save energy. You could do this by:
- Reducing the time you spend in the shower by a couple of minutes.
- Bathing children every other night rather than every night.
- Filling up your dishwasher instead of washing up.
- If you are washing up, filling the bowl rather than leaving the water running.
Learn how to use your heat pump efficiently
If you have a heat pump already, you’re already making a great choice for both the planet and your energy bills. Here’s how to ensure it keeps running as efficiently as possible:
- Heat pumps work best if they are left on at a constant level – 19 degrees in the day and 17 degrees overnight for example, rather than being turned on and off like a traditional boiler.
- For optimum comfort, it’s still important to limit any draughts in your home. By keeping doors and windows shut, you can prevent your heat pump going into setback mode – a mode that saves energy by maintaining a much lower temperature.
- If you have a Good Energy heat pump, our team can remotely monitor its efficiency and make suggestions about how you can save money on your energy bills.
How to make your home more energy efficient long term
If you have the flexibility to make bigger improvements, a good place to start could be a heat survey. This uses thermal imaging cameras to analyse where heat is escaping from your home.
If heat is escaping through the roof, you may need to install (or update) loft insulation. For windows, it could be most effective to replace single pane windows or older double glazing. And if most heat is escaping through walls, you could explore cavity wall or external wall insulation. Proper insulation won’t just keep heat in during winter – it will help keep it out in hot summer weather too.
Here are some cost and saving estimates for different types of insulation, based on a typical three-bedroom semidetached house:
Helping those struggling with the cost of living
If you are looking for ways to support households affected by the cost of living crisis, consider donating to:
Why swap a gas boiler for a heat pump?
Cosy, clean and future-proof: find out why more people than ever before are swapping gas boilers for heat pumps.
