That aisle at Home Depot with all the winterizing gear? It's jam-packed with overly-expensive stuff that might not do your home any good. Here's a few relatively cheap and easy moves you can make to cut your heating bills.
Lock down your windows
In every home, there's a trade-off between visibility and insulation happening around each window. If you're stuck in an apartment with windows older than your parents, we'll suggest a few options, depending on what you're hoping for in looks and permanence.
The quickest, cheapest, yet still effective solution for windows you don't need to look beautiful is a bubblewrap application, as detailed by Build It Solar. You'll only need water and some tape to affix the fun-to-pop stuff to a window, it still lets light through, and it's surprisingly good at putting hundreds of little pockets of air between your warm room and the cold window surface. Thanks ecelinesphyt for the tip!
Don't like your windows looking like they were just shipped from NewEgg? This Old House has some cheap and easy fixes. Besides the self-sticking foam insulation you'll find in every hardware store (that you should never buy too thick) and weather-sealing, packing-like tape, they recommend this particularly effective solution:
My favorite (draft blocker) is Mortite caulking cord. Caulking cord is sorta like that clay you played with in kindergarten that never dried. You can peel strips of it off the roll and shmoosh it into any gaps in your window.
Dodge the draft (under your door)
The space under a door is kind of necessary if you want to open it, but it's a fairly obvious way for heat to escape one room and float into unheated areas where it isn't necessary.
Draft dodgers are the slightly pun-ish name for cloth or insulation stoppers that fit the space under a door, but still allow the door to open with relative ease. The Cool Tools blog points to a neat "Twin Draft Stopper" that runs about $10, is easily adjustable for most any door, and is machine-washable, to boot.
Don't dig the somewhat utilitarian look of retail draft dodgers? The Not Martha blog has a picture-packed guide to a fashionable DIY door draft stopper. The full Flickr set shows how you can pack however much insulating foam you need, cut to size, and seems to fit a bit more snugly than its commercial brethren. Thanks to windupbird000 for the link!
Finally, you could do what Lifehacker intern alumnus infmom did and get serious about your attic door, which is where housing heat sneaks off to when it's ready to be completely useless and expensive:
A lot of the heat was escaping directly up the stairwell to the attic, because the door fit poorly. We got some weatherstripping designed for exterior doors, and a rubber door sweep, and attached those. Doing that cut our gas usage down by a full 25%.
Get a programmable thermostat (and a good program)
If you have to pick one upgrade to pitch to your landlord, or your significant other, this is the one. A slightly smart, electronic thermostat is leagues better than even the sharpest memory, and a good program running on it evens out the heating demands of your big empty spaces. Photo by Mick Wright.
MetaFilter commenter notsnot wrote in October 2007 about his own program, which uses the momentum of warm-up and cool-down periods to eliminate unnecessary furnace fire-ups:
... The biggest energy saver for me was to get an electronic thermostat. During the day, the house drops to 54. (the cat has one small space heater he sleeps near) I warm the place up to 66 for an hour in the morning for my girlfriend to wake up, and in the evening. By nine pm, I let the temp freefall back to 56 - to which the house cools down by the time I hit the sack at 10:30. This scheme - pretty much cutting all the fat out of the heating schedule - dropped my heating bills from $250-300 down to a much more manageable $160, in a drafty brick house.
At my own just-purchased house, where I'm paying the full brunt of heating bills for the first time, I work near an oil-filled, auto-shut-off space heater in my small office during the day, with the house heat set to 54. The heat kicks up to 60 at 5 p.m., then 65 at 6 p.m., and if my wife or I want it warmer than that sooner, we hit the thermostat up, but it remembers its general program. The temperature drops to 57 at night, then back up to 64 for the mornings, when we're usually too busy getting ready (or writing posts) to notice much, then back to 54 soon after my wife usually leaves.
Need a thermostat recommendation? Consumerist pulls out a commenter pick from a post on household winterizing fixes:
Honeywell programmable t-stats FTW. Instead of just doing a 1-2 degree over/under, they target a certain number of cycles per hour, and then change the duration of the cycles to keep the house comfy. Also, the setpoint times are done by getting your house TO the setpoint by the time you select, as opposed to turning on the system at the same time every day. This makes it better able to deal with the differing heating demands of 40-degree days vs. 0-degree days.
Aside from those specific targets, we'd also recommend Kiplinger's fall home maintenance list, specifically the note about having a professional service and checking your furnace while it's still warm enough to feel your toes. And, as many commenters recommend, keeping yourself warm goes a long way to negating the heating needs of your house, so peeking at Real Simple's winter-proofing body guide couldn't hurt your chances at a cheaper winter, either.
What simple home heat efficiency projects did we miss? We skipped the skeptical stuff, like shrink-sealing window plastic, the mostly impractical stuff (Kotatsu, anyone?), and the obvious stuff ("Don't leave your door open!"), but we're open to more suggestions in the comments.