A Quebec winter finds every weak spot in a house. The good news is that most of what keeps you warm through January costs little or nothing, and the few things that do cost something tend to pay for themselves. Here are ten, roughly in order of what they save.
1. Set the thermostat where the savings are. Hydro-Québec recommends 20 °C in the rooms you live in and 17 °C in bedrooms and overnight. Wearing a sweater at 20 °C costs a great deal less than wearing a t-shirt at 25 °C, and a cooler bedroom is better for sleep as well as for the bill. Every degree counts, so start here before anything else.
2. Let a thermostat do the work for you. Holding a steady temperature by hand is difficult. Electronic and programmable thermostats hold the room within a fraction of a degree instead of swinging above and below the setpoint, and they drop the temperature at night and while the house is empty without anyone remembering to. Hydro-Québec puts the saving from switching to electronic thermostats at up to 10% of annual consumption.
3. Stop heating rooms nobody uses. A spare bedroom, a storage room or a finished basement that sits empty does not need to be at 20 °C. Turn those rooms down and keep the doors closed. Do leave them at around 16 °C rather than shutting the heat off completely, so that plumbing stays safe and moisture does not settle into the cold surfaces.
4. Change the filter. This is the cheapest thing on the list and the one most often skipped. A clogged filter starves the system of air, which makes it run longer for less heat and wears the blower out early. Check it monthly through the heating season and replace it when it looks grey.
5. Book maintenance before the cold, not during it. A furnace or heat pump that has been cleaned and adjusted delivers more heat for the same electricity, and the problems that leave people without heat in January are usually visible in October. We recommend two service visits a year, one before the heating season and one before the cooling season. Our maintenance page sets out what each visit covers, and this article explains what normal maintenance looks like.
6. Seal the leaks you can feel. Run your hand around door frames, window trim and the rim joist where the basement meets the framing on a cold day. Weatherstripping and a tube of caulking cost very little and stop the draughts that make a properly heated room feel cold. This is an afternoon of work with a lasting return. Our article on three heating mistakes that get expensive goes further on where the heat escapes.
7. Use the sun, then shut it out. Open the curtains and blinds on south and west windows on clear days and let the sun do some of the heating for free. Close them at dusk, before the glass turns cold. Lined or thermal curtains are noticeably better at this than sheer ones.
8. Keep the heat moving. Furniture pushed against a baseboard, a rug over a floor register or a curtain hanging in front of a supply vent all trap heat where nobody benefits from it. Leave the vents and returns clear. If you have ceiling fans, running them slowly in reverse pushes the warm air that has collected at the ceiling back down into the room.
9. Watch the humidity. Air at 30 to 40% relative humidity feels warmer than dry air at the same temperature, which means you can be comfortable at a lower setting. Too dry and the house feels cold no matter what the thermostat says; too humid and the windows fog and drip. A humidifier tied to the central system keeps it in range without you thinking about it.
10. Look at what is doing the heating. Everything above helps at the margins. What decides the bill is the equipment. Electric baseboards give you exactly one unit of heat for one unit of electricity and never more, while a heat pump delivers up to three, and the same machine cools the house in July. If your heating is baseboards or an aging furnace, that is where the real money is, and efficient models qualify for government rebates. Our article on the most economical method of home heating compares the options.
The first nine will make this winter more comfortable. The tenth is the one that changes what you pay every winter after it. Talk to one of our advisors and we will tell you what your house is working with and what it would take to do better.
