The current weather is ideal for enjoying the outdoors in light attire, but as winter approaches, we must brace for colder days.
With energy costs soaring, households are on the lookout for ways to cut down on their heating bills. While donning a jumper and using draught excluders are well-known tips, there are other straightforward and cost-free methods that can make a significant difference.
The way you position your furniture and fixtures can greatly affect heat retention and circulation within your home. Daniel Ufland, one of the co-founders of Flitch, an online interior styling service, shares a lesser-known tip for reducing winter energy expenses that uses a football.
“The simple trick to saving on energy bills is optimising the layout of your furniture! Suboptimal room layout can impair heating efficiency, leading to increased energy consumption and higher bills,” he explains, as reports the Mirror.
“Optimising your room layout Is a practical way to enhance heating efficiency in your home, with the added bonus of improving the aesthetics.”
To keep your home warmer and save money, it’s important to avoid placing furniture directly in front of radiators. Doing so blocks the heat from spreading into the room effectively, trapping it behind the furniture instead, and leading people to unnecessarily turn up the heating.
By being savvy with your furniture arrangement and the layout of your rooms, you can maximise the efficiency of your heat sources and better insulate areas that are prone to losing heat, thus enhancing your living space for optimal warmth retention and distribution.
The football rule for saving money on heating
“Is there a bed, curtain, settee, comfy chair or similar right in front of your radiator? If so, the item will be absorbing heat from the heat source. You’re basically spending money on heating up your sofa, leaving the rest of the room cool or even cold,” Daniel points out. .
If this is happening in your home, Daniel advises moving your furniture away from the heat source by about the width of a soccer football to allow for proper convection, enabling your radiator to effectively send heat upwards and out into the room. .
Daniel further explains: “By repositioning your furniture away from radiators, you can drastically improve heat distribution, ensuring warm air circulates freely throughout the space.”
He notes that even a slight increase in the gap can make a significant difference – warming the room more efficiently so you can lower the thermostat and save on your heating energy bill.
Insulate homes from chilly exterior walls with your own furniture
“Outside house walls are often chilly during winter – particularly if they’re badly insulated, as many older walls are. If you live in a cold climate, this can be a real problem,” says Daniel, highlighting the importance of
Positioning large items of furniture such as beds, sofas, and hefty chairs to serve as wall insulators can help to cut down on the chill from cold walls entering your room, while also preventing the heat within your room from being soaked up by the wall.
“If you’ve got tall furniture like a bookshelf or a thick curtain, use that – don’t forget that heat rises, so tall furniture will insulate the wall higher up, where heat is usually escaping,” he adds.