Over the past couple of years, the cost for utility bills has grown at a scary pace and many people are seeing that their utility bills this year are notably higher than in previous years, which has many homeowners alarmed as we start to approach the Winter when our utility usage is at is highest.
If you want to pre-emptively get ahead of your utility bills for this Winter, you still have plenty of time to make some decorative adjustments around your home, which will help you lower your utility bills to a more manageable level. Here are 3 easy decor changes to make your home more efficient.
Buy New Window Blinds To Improve Insulation
With the recent increases in the cost of fuel and heating, ensuring that your home is well insulated has never been more important. Having a properly insulated home will help keep your heating bills in check this Winter, but for many people the cost of fully insulating their home may be prohibitively expensive.
So, if you can’t afford to fully insulate your home, but want to take some smaller steps to improve your insulation, using thermal blinds can help insulate your windows and if you have a bi-fold door a good set of bifold door blinds can help insulate your patio doors and avoid heat loss through your windows. Windows are one of the biggest heat loss areas in any home, so insulating your windows should be enough to help temper your heating bills this winter. What an easy decor change!
Easy decor change: Upgrade Your Lightbulbs To Save Money Long Term
Electricity bills have also increased in cost recently, admittedly not as much as the cost of heating, but as the days get shorter and we spend more time with the lights on at home, it’s enough that your electricity bills will noticeably be more expensive than previous years.
To help offset the increase in energy prices, you should look at upgrading the lightbulbs in your home, from old style bulbs to newer and more efficient LED lightbulbs. Swapping over to LED bulbs will save you money now as well in the long term, these bulbs are far more power efficient than other types of bulbs and generally have a much longer lifespan which means you’ll need to replace them far less often than you currently do.
Improve Heat Retention By Painting Your Radiators
We’ve already spoken about how to insulate your home effectively, but beyond insulating your home you can dramatically increase the heat retention of your radiators so that they stay warmer for longer, effectively giving you more bang for your buck every time you put the heating on in your home.
Just by painting your radiator any colour except white, it will become much more effective at holding heat. This is because white is the most reflective colour, meaning with a white radiator (who knows why white is the default colour for radiators), it’s constantly reflecting the heat away, but darker colours will absorb much more of the heat, leading to your radiators staying warm for longer.
Photos by Spacejoy on Unsplash
