Winter has been hitting us hard in Melbourne this year. It has also been hitting our bills hard from our use of the heater. Not being made of money, we’ve been trying to do what we can to keep these bills as low as we can. Here are our strategies to keep the heater turned off:
- Wear more/warmer clothes. If it’s not a bitterly cold day, we can get away with not having to turn the heater on by doing this. And if we do turn the heater on, we don’t need it on as high.
- Sitting with a blanket on our laps keeps us warm if we’re doing something sedentary like watching a DVD or reading a book
- On cold mornings, we’ll turn the heater on in the morning to warm up the house, turn it off after an hour or two and see if we can get through the rest of the day without it. If it’s horribly cold, we might only get through half a day, but that’s still going to save us money on our gas bill. On a better day we might be able to keep it off until the sun goes down.
- We turn all heaters off overnight. We’ll dress warmly and have enough warm covers, blankets, doonas etc.
- I’m trying to get to bed at a reasonable hour so I can get a decent amount of sleep. When I succeed, I also save money on heating because it means I will turn the heater off sooner.
- Let the sun in! Opening the curtains makes a difference especially when there is sun hitting the windows, even if it is otherwise cold outside. The same applies to clearing other things that may be blocking the sun from hitting the windows. Hubby recently rolled back some shade cloth we have next to some of our windows and we’ve noticed the difference to how warm that room feels on a sunny but cold day.
- Moving keeps you warmer! Even if it’s just being up and about cooking, washing dishes or hanging laundry on clothes horses, I notice I am colder if I am mostly stationary.
- We make sure to turn the heater off when we leave the house. Our ducted heating would be safe to leave on while we’re out, but we figure that coming home to a warm house is not worth the money, and it will warm up quick enough once we’re home and turn it back on.
Some of these things may sound pretty obvious, but it’s interesting when I talk to people who don’t do some of these things, which I thought were the normal thing to do.
What strategies do you have for keeping your heating bills low? Please share any other ideas you have in the comments below!
Originally posted 2015-08-24 12:00:01.
All great ideas Samantha! I enjoyed reading your post in Belgium as we head in to autumn in the northern hemisphere – hopefully things are starting to warm up again in Melbourne!
Just a word of caution about keeping the heater turned off: be careful that it doesn’t lead to other problems to your house that might eventually cost more money than what you save – like mould (I speak from experience!).
We have a wood heater which makes a huge difference in bills especially when our shire has free permits to roadside collect (just watch for termites). I also find cooking and baking goes a long way to warming up the house and body! !