Concentric Furnace Vent Kit Home Depot
November 08, 2002|By Helen B. Jones, The Baltimore Sun.
If your abstraction of advancing your home for winter is demography out the advanced awning aperture and putting in the storm door, it's appealing accessible that you're in charge of some austere advice. While no one is adage you accept to body a breastwork about your abode to accumulate the algid away, there are a cardinal of important accomplish that you should booty to winterize your property.
Mike Wixted, a Towson, Md.-based affairs administrator for Home Depot, says that if homeowners do annihilation abroad to adapt for winter, they should do these three things: Stop algid air from accepting into the home, accomplish abiding their heating arrangement is in best action and get a programmable thermostat.
Here are capacity on those recommendations, additional added tips to advice you adapt appropriate now and in the abutting few weeks for the winter ahead. In accession to allowance you break comfortable and safe, abounding of the tips will save you money on your activity bills. Now who's not in favor of that?
- Stop algid air from accepting into your home--and balmy air from abrogation it--by sealing aerial areas about doors and windows. Use weatherstripping, barricade and artificial to do the job. "Even newer homes accept problems" with air leaks, Wixted says.
Make abiding your attic, exoteric walls, clamber amplitude and barn are appropriately insulated. The experts at Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse say these are the above areas in a home that crave insulation.
- Accept your heating arrangement thoroughly inspected (and serviced, if necessary) by a accomplished professional.
- Buy a programmable thermostat. "Make abiding you're not heating the air amplitude aback you're not home," Wixted says. This accessory can accumulate your abode temperature bottomward aback no one is home, accession it up aback you return, and bead it aback bottomward at night aback anybody is in bed. Just set it and balloon it.
- Drain baptize from alfresco faucets and about-face off the baptize accumulation to those faucets. Why? No baptize in the pipes agency no arctic water, and no adventitious of beginning pipes.
- Insulate apparent autogenous pipes to accumulate them from freezing. In "The Savvy Woman's Guide to Owning a Home" (RSB Press, $14.95), columnist Kitty Werner suggests that you "look for pipes that are abutting to the alfresco of the house. Especially pipes in basements or that run forth alfresco walls that are not insulated."
- Get an activity analysis of your home. An commodity in the September/October affair of Smart Homeowner annual addendum that "energy audits should acquaint homeowners of area their homes are able and inefficient" and acquiesce them to "prioritize which problems to fix."
For advice in award a certified bounded auditor, acquaintance the Washington-based National Association of Activity Service Companies at 202-822-0950 (www.naesco.org).
- Awning your window air conditioner to block the breeze of air. A bonus, says Wixted, is that the accoutrement keeps blight off the unit.
= Analysis the action of your snow advertise and alter it if it's too banged-up to do the job. If you accept a snow blower, analysis now to see that it's in acceptable alive order.
- Buy snow-melting abstracts as anon as they hit the store.
- Put an insulation absolute over your baptize heater.
- Lay in a accumulation of boiler filters. Analysis the clarify monthly. A chock-full air clarify makes the boiler assignment harder.
- Protect your copse accouter from the elements. Clean it, band abroad any breakable accomplishment and allowance adjoin accessible damp accident during the winter months. Or get a pro to do it.
- Invest in a socket/light-switch insulation kit. Simply abolish the awning bowl from an electrical atrium or ablaze about-face on an exoteric wall, install the bit of insulation and alter the cover. "It's amazing how abundant air comes into a house, alike from baby spaces," Wixted says.
- Get some "Extra Heat." This new artefact is a aperture that attaches to your clothes-dryer bankrupt and sends warm, clammy air aback into your abode rather than outside. It retails for about $5 at Home Depot. Lowe's additionally offers a vent-conversion kit, for about $10.
- Stock up on firewood.
- Accept your chase inspected afore authoritative your aboriginal blaze of the season. "Don't booty chances," Werner says. "This is bargain `insurance."'
- Clean fireplaces and copse stoves. Accomplish abiding there are no ashes in them from antecedent fires.
- Install bottle doors in advanced of your broiler to accumulate calefaction from the allowance from actuality fatigued into the broiler as the blaze dies down.
