Misadventures in Energy-Saving and Winterizing My Apartment

Granted, December was unusually cold last year. And, we live in an 1890s house converted into two apartments. The people upstairs were gone for most of December and turned their heat way down. Heat rises, so I knew that some of my heating bill was literally going up the stairs and out of my hands.

But, all that aside, I was not prepared for the $400 heating bill!

My apartment is spacious with high ceilings, but that was unacceptable. Once I recovered from my shock, I decided it was time to weatherize my house. Here’s what we did to improve our heating costs by more than $150 the very next month.
Step one, force the upstairs neighbors to stay home and not turn their heat to 55 degrees. Okay, so I couldn’t really force them to stay home, but I did point out the problem to my landlady and she discussed it with them. I think they agreed to keep their thermostat on 60 degrees.

Then, it was powwow time to figure out why it was that we were using so much electricity. We decided to turn the thermostat down to 65. It mean sitting through the remainder of the winter with a blanket when I was watching television, but I’m sure it helped with that overall electric bill.

Next, it was time for the most dreaded of ideas. Check the weather-stripping!

I am not the handiest of sorts and the concept of trying to get the house better insulated was horribly intimidating, but then again, so was that $400 bill. So, I decided that as an intelligent woman, I could handle this. And, the big box hardware store has lots of helpful staff.

My first purchase was adhesive backed weather stripping. This is about 1/4-inch thick foam with a peel-off backing. This, I could use. My second was the pre-packaged box of plastic sheeting, complete with tape and instructions, for putting over the inside of your windows. This proved to be a little more difficult as they wanted to know the size of my windows and “big” was not listed as a category.

I could estimate that my windows are about 30 inches across and depending on which room we’re talking about, 5 to 7 feet tall. None of the pre-package options came anywhere close to those measurements. That made this a much harder part of the solution. But I found some designed for picture windows that I could cut down to the right size, spent my $30 on home improvement and headed for the door.

I should have gotten more help.

Weather-stripping the doors was easy. I used my kitchen scissors to cut the foam to the right size, peeled away the paper backing and stuck the foam in the big cracks around the door. That made me confident enough to take on the rest of the project. Man, was I a fool.

I started with the one window in the living room that isn’t behind a book case. The two that are, I figured that enough big wood to keep the cool air from flowing through the room. But the one, on the western side of the house, is next to a futon and I had noticed that people sitting on the futon were often chilly. When I paid a little more attention, I saw that on very windy days, I could see the blinds blowing with the wind.

This was a little harder. The first step was to put weather-stripping in the bottom of the window, creating a better seal when the window was closed. Seemed simple, except that once I had the weather-weather stripping in place, I discovered it was too thick. The window would not lock back into place. It would shut, but the locks wouldn’t work.

And, pulling up the weather-stripping just wasn’t happening. That self-adhesive stuff is pretty strong.

Finally, I arrived at the perfectly logical solution of squishing the foam down as much as I could and then having someone much stronger than me force the window into place. It worked. He got the window shut and locked.

For the record, these windows were state of the art when the landlady installed them in the 1970s. They are hung on ropes to create a counterbalance and were, at the time, enormously energy-efficient. Now, they are just a royal pain.

One we got the window closed, we began the two-person job of hanging the plastic sheeting. Well, actually, first we had to take down the blinds and cut the plastic to the right size and then hang the plastic.

This involves starting at the top with the two-sided, enormously sticky tape and attaching the plastic to the tape above the window. It’s not too hard as long as you have two people, one whose job is mostly to keep the plastic straight.

Then, I discovered that like the self-adhesive on the weather stripping, this stuff is really sticky. Really, really sticky. Since I know where to look, I can still see my fingerprint, courtesy of the several layers of skin it removed, stuck to the tape on one of my windows. It was like a huge paper cut, about the size of a pea, and left me bleeding. I was no longer convinced that this was worth the effort.

I think it was my husband’s insistence and a good old fashioned streak of stubbornness that finally won out and we finished most of the house. We decided not to do the computer room/home office, as we could just keep the door to that room closed. If that room was a little chilly, oh, well. And, it’s the farthest from the thermostat, so the central heat was going to get the misimpression based on that room that it needed to run more.

We also door runners to put in front of the door to the basement and the office, to lock the cold air in those places. And, it’s not terribly attractive to look at, but we took plain black fleece and hung it over the 4 large windows in the master bedroom.
Fleece is amazing insulation and made the bedroom warmer immediately. It also cut down on that pesky sunlight waking us up in the morning. Since we both tend to be night owls, the accidental benefit of this was that we got to sleep better. It kept out more light than our mini-blinds ever thought of and did a pretty good job of keeping out random noise as well, though somehow the crickets are still very loud.

By January, our heating bill had dropped $150! Now, the logical part of my brain reminds me that the neighbors were home and thus running heat upstairs and that January was a strangely warmer month than December, but I have decided to maintain my theory that my $30 expenditure saved that money. It made it easier to justify buying the new outfit I wanted!
Justifications aside, the small steps we took to save energy and weatherize our apartment paid for themselves in that first month and we have yet to see a bill anywhere near that high again. And, I think it kept the cool air in this summer, lowering our air conditioning bills. Unfortunately, the real test is coming soon. They’re predicting frost by the end of the week.