If you live in a cold winter climate, something you always worry about is whether you have enough or good enough insulation in your home. If your energy bills skyrocket during the winter, you might want to take a better look at your homes insulation. It’s all about comfort and cost, and you deserve to have both.
Here are 5 things to think about as it pertains to insulating your home.
1. If you have a basement, make sure the ceiling is insulated well. This isn’t for the basement, but for the floors above. Unfortunately, just having rugs on the floors, even if they’re thick rugs, are not enough to keep cold air from coming into the rest of your house. Sure, cold air supposedly goes down, but if it can’t go down it will come up, and your feet will always be cold. Pay close attention to crawl spaces instead of full basements; they seem to generate more concentrated cold.
2. Make sure to add extra insulation to any areas of your house that directly access the outside. This means doors, windows, and attics most specifically. If you have bilco doors, you will want to make sure they are totally sealed as well.
3. Check your electrical outlets. Most people don’t think about these, but if you have thin walls they will also send cold air into your house. You might want to have extra insulation blown between your walls, but if you can’t do that then add some insulation, possibly foam inserts, between the wall and your faceplate. Even putting those plastic outlet plugs into the outlets you are not using around your house will help.
4. Install air vents in your house that close whenever you do not have air blowing through them. In many houses, when the heat goes off for awhile you can notice that it feels like cold air coming through the vents. You want to be able to seal heat in for at least a little while longer, which also helps on utility costs.
5. Think about insulating your pipes. You lose a lot of heat from pipes whenever they are pushing through hot water, and if you have hot water heaters in your house, they will run more efficiently if your pipes are insulated. This also protects the pipes from being cooled too fast too often.
Mitch Mitchell is a consultant who writes and participates in many different fields, including real estate finance issues. 
Thanks for this very nice tips, after all the snow storms we really should check out our insulators to keep our houses warm. Very nice tips again and thank you!
Good tips… I moved to New Hampshire a little more than a year ago, and any help I can get is good help. I especially liked number 4. I’ve not heard of self closing vents, but I can see how they would be helpful, especially as I have a lot of vents running through the basement.
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Good info even for those of us that don’t normally see sub freezing temps. I’m sure these temperatures have exposed many poor insulation issues as well as non functioning door and window seals. Hey at least it was a windfall for Home Depot and Lowes
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Quite a few of these upgrades can also be written off on your taxes under the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency tax credit. Plus you’ll save money on your utilities so it pays for itself over time.
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Great tips, especially in this cold weather, we really need to look watch out the insulation of our home. A proper insulated home can save a lot of energy thereby reducing your electricity bills. Do you know if everybody lowered there thermostats by 1 degree it would make a huge impact on the planet?
Many good and interesting tips, but I recommend you to rental a thermocamera and find all small and big wind hole in your house. You don’t going to believe what you going to see. It is cheap to rent.
I have done most of these tips, but never heard of self-closing air vents. I will definitely look into them. Always learning something new!
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I second the idea of insulating pipes. This definitely helps your hot water heater perform much more efficiently, which brings down energy costs.