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Any advice on how to cut heating bill without fugly-fying your house?
LOL, only heat one room - the one you're in. Get an electric heating cover for your mattress or electric blanket. Get some cushy slippers and robes. Cover the windows with plastic, and weatherstrip. And put heating tape on the plumbing instead of heating the room where the plumbing is. Those are some things I did when I rented and didn't have good insulation in WA.
If you can use wood heat, that might be cheaper, depending. You can also get a timed thermostat that will warm up the house just before you get home from work. And turn the heat way down at night. Let the faucets drip a little to keep from freezing, too.
Also, sometimes it's cheaper to have a little space heater by your feet, rather than heat the whole room.
I've been hearing a lot lately about using bubble wrap as insulation, You just spray the window with water and place the bubble wrap on the window and it stays and it's removable.
Hire an energy consultant. A lot of states will refund you when you do this. They will identify and seal leaks.
Air seal and then worry about insulation. Insulation will much depend on the type of home and what you can do reasonably without destroying the house. You can download a program for $50 called HVAC-Calc that will tell you where the most heat loss occurs in your home (if you input valid information). There are free programs like BeOPT but I found HVAC calc easy enough to use.
Then once you air seal , you can upgrade insulation based on ease of installation and bang for buck.
there does not have to be an air leak to lose a LOT of heat to the cold glass of your windows. If the loss of $1000+ per year (for no reason) to heating bills means nothing to you, then you aint hurting and have no need of such savings. but plenty of people here will benefit from it, if they aint too cheap and lazy to do it. Smells can be dealt with by putting out boxes of baking soda and by oppening up a window and door and running a fan for a few minutes. If you can't figure out such a simple thing, there's no helping you. YOu could also create enough discipline and respect by those kids that they stay clean, like you should have been doing all along. the blue tape comes down without a scratch. the thumbtack holes seal easily with just ;aint and an artist's brush. mark the plastic, so it goes back up int he right places next year, roll it up and stow it.
I've used "heat bubbled Ytvek and heavy duty mylar space blanket materal to stay cool/warm as needed in my minivan, when I lived in it for 10 months. just move the mateirals inside or out as the season requires. for winter use, create a 3x3x7 ft particle board box, 2x4 edges, and seai it with the spay styrofoam and gorilla tape. you want it light tight if you want to read or use the net in your parsking spot. use red lensed glasses to reat, and turn the screen lighting way down on your computer, can store a lot fo stuff atop your bed box snd in a few chest of drawers that you'rve cut in half horizonally. Bunchee strap them to the lloor and have a strap keeing them closed. Remve the rear seats and the front passenger seat and you'll have plenty of rood in a min van for one person.
there does not have to be an air leak to lose a LOT of heat to the cold glass of your windows. If the loss of $1000+ per year (for no reason) to heating bills means nothing to you, then you aint hurting and have no need of such savings. but plenty of people here will benefit from it, if they aint too cheap and lazy to do it. Smells can be dealt with by putting out boxes of baking soda and by oppening up a window and door and running a fan for a few minutes. If you can't figure out such a simple thing, there's no helping you. YOu could also create enough discipline and respect by those kids that they stay clean, like you should have been doing all along. the blue tape comes down without a scratch. the thumbtack holes seal easily with just ;aint and an artist's brush. mark the plastic, so it goes back up int he right places next year, roll it up and stow it.
Oh, for God's sake, we do bathe regularly around here! And I do laundry every single friggin' day. I'm waiting for a load to finish right now, so I can fold it. But teenage boys stink. They just do. Cooking odors build up, and so does humidity, which leads to mold. Houses need to breathe. I'll weather-strip the doors and windows and bulk up the insulation in the attic, but I draw the line at making my house into plastic-wrapped tomb.
We use that thin plastic that's like saran wrap, the kind you adhere to the window edges with hair dryer. What a difference! Back in the 1970s people tightened their houses up too much and it ended up causing problems with unhealthy indoor air quality.
there does not have to be an air leak to lose a LOT of heat to the cold glass of your windows. If the loss of $1000+ per year (for no reason) to heating bills means nothing to you, then you aint hurting and have no need of such savings. but plenty of people here will benefit from it, if they aint too cheap and lazy to do it. Smells can be dealt with by putting out boxes of baking soda and by oppening up a window and door and running a fan for a few minutes. If you can't figure out such a simple thing, there's no helping you. YOu could also create enough discipline and respect by those kids that they stay clean, like you should have been doing all along. the blue tape comes down without a scratch. the thumbtack holes seal easily with just ;aint and an artist's brush. mark the plastic, so it goes back up int he right places next year, roll it up and stow it.
The method you're proposing is inexpensive but also not very effective for a large portion of underinsulated and non-air sealed homes. Adding 2 layers of plastic to windows doesn't raise the R-value much over R2. If you're willing to live with an unattractive solution, you are probably better off over the long run just covering the windows entirely with rigid foam insulation rated R10.
Plastic sheeting is only going to be highly effective in the subset of homes that are relatively well insulated but for some reason have an excess of air leaks around the areas you're covering with plastic. It might work for you, but it's going to depend a lot on the climate and individual construction. Most energy hog houses have multiple energy inefficiencies that go well beyond leaky doors and windows. Plastic sheeting isn't effective for sealing rim joists - which are responsible for 50% of air leaks in homes where they were never sealed. It can't be effectively used to seal around pipes and floor gaps. Ultimately it fails because it can only be used to stop a subset of energy loss due to air leaks. Plastic sheets have little effect on radiant heat loss, which is the biggest factor in most under-insulated homes.
Finally, as others have pointed out if you seal up a house that is poorly insulated, you will likely end up with mold. All of that warm, moist air generated by 'living' is going to end up condensing on cold walls and ceilings just as it would on a single pane window.
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