How to Heat Your Home for Less This Winter
Heating is the biggest energy cost in most homes, which makes it the place where changes are worth the most — and also the place where people spend money on the wrong things.
This is ordered by return on effort. The first four cost nothing. Nothing below them beats them.
Free, and worth more than anything you can buy
Heat the rooms you use
If you have any way to control heating room by room — radiator valves, zone controls, individual heaters — use it. Heating empty rooms is the largest avoidable waste in a typical home.
Turn down the rooms nobody sits in. Not off entirely in a damp climate, but low.
Turn the thermostat down one degree
One degree is close to imperceptible and applies to every hour of every day of the heating season.
Try it for two weeks before judging. Your sense of “normal” recalibrates faster than you expect, and most people never turn it back up.
Check your heating schedule against your actual life
Heating timers are usually set once and then left for years, while jobs change, school runs change, and people start working from home.
Look at the schedule. Is it heating an empty house every weekday morning? Is it running for two hours after everyone is in bed? This is a five-minute check that people postpone indefinitely.
Close the curtains at dusk
Windows lose heat faster than walls, and closing curtains slows it. Open them in daylight so any sun does some of the work for you.
Costs nothing, works immediately.
Cheap, and pays back the same winter
Deal with draughts
Cold air comes in under external doors, through letterboxes and keyholes, around old window frames, through floorboard gaps and up unused chimneys. Your heating runs longer to compensate.
Self-adhesive draught strip, a brush strip for the door, and a chimney balloon for an unused fireplace cost very little between them and take an afternoon.
Do this before considering anything expensive. It’s the best-value heating measure available to most households.
Reflective panels behind radiators on external walls
A radiator on an outside wall sends heat into the wall. A reflective panel behind it sends more of that heat back into the room.
Cheap, and takes minutes per radiator. Only worth doing on external walls.
Stop furniture and curtains blocking radiators
A sofa in front of a radiator absorbs its heat. Long curtains hanging over one send heat straight up the window.
Move the sofa forward a little; tuck the curtain behind. Free, and immediately noticeable.
Close doors
Heat moves to wherever is coldest. An open door to an unheated hallway or stairwell drains a warm room continuously.
Worth understanding before you spend
“Heating the person, not the house”
Warm clothing, a blanket on the sofa, a hot water bottle, a draught-excluded room. Genuinely effective and genuinely cheap — being warm and being in a warm house are not the same thing.
This does have limits. A home that is too cold is a health issue, not a budgeting one, particularly for older people, very young children, and anyone with a respiratory condition. If you are choosing between heating and other essentials, that’s a situation to seek proper help with rather than a problem to optimise. Most countries have schemes and grants for exactly this, and they routinely go unclaimed.
Portable electric heaters
Widely misunderstood. Electric heaters are close to 100% efficient at turning electricity into heat — but electricity typically costs considerably more per unit than gas.
The honest position: heating one small room with a portable heater instead of the whole house can work out cheaper. Using them as a substitute for central heating across a whole home usually doesn’t. Compare your own per-unit prices rather than trusting a rule of thumb.
Bleeding radiators
If a radiator is cold at the top and warm at the bottom, there’s air trapped in it and it isn’t heating the room properly. Bleeding it takes a couple of minutes and a radiator key.
Worth checking every radiator at the start of the season.
What people buy that rarely pays back quickly
Space-heater gadgets marketed as slashing bills. There is no device that heats a room for meaningfully less than the cost of the energy it consumes, whatever the advertising says.
If something claims otherwise, the claim is about the room size or the running time, not about physics.
Before spending anything larger
Insulation and glazing genuinely reduce heating costs, and both are real investments with long payback periods. Before paying for either, check what grants or schemes exist where you live. Home energy efficiency is heavily subsidised in many countries and the support is frequently unclaimed.
The four to do this week
- Turn down radiators in rooms nobody uses. Free, and the biggest single change.
- Check your heating schedule against the life you actually live now.
- Fix the draughts. An afternoon and a few euros, and it pays back every winter.
- Thermostat down one degree. Give it two weeks before deciding.