There are countless ways to save on energy at home and up to 50% of your household's energy usage goes toward heating and cooling. That's why it's a good idea to check for leaky windows and doors, and seal up your home to keep the warm or cool air inside where it belongs. And without the right sealing and insulation — on your windows, doors, electrical components, and even attics — the warm or cool air inside your home can escape—wasting money and energy.
Sometimes referred to as draft proofing, weatherization and insulation for your home is one of the cheapest ways to save energy.
Let's explore how to reduce your home energy bills by saving with insulation and weatherization. You'll be surprised to see how simple it is to reduce your home's overall energy use by making small changes, in addition to sealing up your home for energy efficiency.
These are two key components of household sustainability, and often are used together to increase the efficiency of a home. They both work to reduce energy usage and costs in your home, but serve different purposes, and are often used together as part of a "whole-house" weatherization strategy to maximize energy efficiency.
Insulation helps keep heat inside a home by restricting heat transfer between interior rooms and the exterior environment. Some types of insulation (such as fiber-glass, mineral wool, and cellulose), when installed properly, can actually act as forms of weatherization because they reduce the amount of heat that gets transferred through the walls, floors, and roof of your home. Conductive heat transfer is the process in which heat is transported through solid matter by a fluid flowing between them. Heat is transferred as conduction to adjacent areas of different temperatures.
Weatherization improves a home’s efficiency by reducing heat loss even when the temperature outside is cold. Simply put, insulation helps keep the heat you’ve already made inside your house, and weatherization helps keep the cold outside from making your house too warm.
Heating and cooling account for more than half of all household energy usage. On average, 51% of annual household energy is spent on heating and cooling. These uses are highly variable by geography, size, and structure of the home and the type of equipment being used. Other common, but less intensive, uses of energy include water heating and cooking.
There are lots of easy ways to make your home more energy efficient, and cozier too. You'll be glad you did when you're snug as a bug in your own comfy home. For example, if you have air leaks in your home, they can be costly. But there is an easy fix that is energy efficient. Air-sealing can reduce air leakage by 25-40%. Watch this video for more.
There are countless ways to save on energy at home and up to 50% of your household's energy usage goes toward heating and cooling. That's why it's a good idea to check for leaky windows and doors, and seal up your home to keep the warm or cool air inside where it belongs.
Insulation reduces heat leakage through ceilings, walls, and floors, while weatherization reduces air infiltration through these paths plus entry points such as windows and doors. Together, these strategies can achieve the following:
Improvements made using these energy efficiency services typically pay for themselves within a handful of years (the "payback period") or less.
