Top 15 Home Winterizing Tips to Save You Money

hi boys and girls we have built a lot of things we have remodeled a lot of things in our house our kingdom today's october 26th we are full swing in fall and it's coming in here real fast and it's cold right now it's 37 degrees this morning 20 20 degrees fahrenheit i keep getting a lot of dms a lot of nice messages about hey thank you so much for giving me the courage to remodel at my house or hey we just bought our first house and i can't wait to do what you did to your house really nice kind messages but you know what we now have to give you some instructions how to take care of this house in cold weather with that being said i wanted to show you 15 things you need to do to winterize your home this year that could also save you a bunch of money on your energy bill so without wasting time let's get into the video let's go [Music] number one let's start with the furnace the mvp the mother ship that keeps us warm if the filter is not changed regularly it gets built up let me show you look at that look how dark and dirty oh that's disgusting shouldn't be breathing this stuff if this is basically packed this is a filter that can't be you can't really breathe through then this old furnace of ours has to work twice as hard to push this air out it creates this blockage this is a brand new filter look at that day and night huh look at that ying and yang by installing this filter in place we now have this nice breathable area that uh can circulate good clean air and not create an obstruction or strain on the motor to keep blowing everything up now normally i would just recommend for you to go hire an hvac guy to come in and service your furnace it'll set you back only about a hundred bucks or so but they'll do a thorough check to make sure everything is a working condition they're not seeing any excessive wear and tear on some of the parts and pieces here causing you problems later down the road basically tell you the health and safety of your furnace now what i'm going to do right now is i'm going to before changing my filter i'm going to do a quick cleaning just very superficial reason why is because this is a workshop i cut a lot of wood here a lot of particles and dust come and settle here so my furnace is going to be slightly dirtier than yours so while i'm here i'm going to give a quick little easy blast through clean all the particles off put a new filter on bada bing bada boom and i'll be good to go oh almost forgot gotta hit the breaker turn the furnace off be right back there we go a little safety here let me show you how nasty this looks you won't believe that this is what happens and how the furnace looks when you work in a workshop and your furnace is right there uh so let's do a quick little cleaning [Music] yeah nice and clean somebody cleaned their room this time huh all right let's put all this back in place not forget our filter make sure you install the right flow pattern arrow coming up now let's go fire this thing up make sure i didn't break anything nice number two on the winter rising and increasing the efficiency of our house is the water heater or the boiler some people might call it typically what happens inside of it is no matter how new this is in fact i think this one's only like two years old the sediment builds up at the very bottom over there and sediment is like rust or kind of metal particles they can cause problems in causing this water heater to work in overtime so what you want to do periodically is to drain the valve that's right here you pulled the little valve and water was all trickling at the bottom getting rid of the sediment first and then the rest of the water after it so let's give it a little pull that's some nasty sediment i'm just glad we got that out of there before it starts creating kind of damage down there and now it's finally nice and clean so now the boiler is ready for this winter now here's the tip that my previous plumber who actually installed this water heater uh told me about he says don't keep it on this very hot though it's kind of nice that idea to turn on and you have scolding hot water but if you just bring it down to the b a b c and then this is very hot a b setting or so number one you'll save a bunch of money on your energy so this will become far more efficient and number two you won't make this thing work as hard as it needs to so you're not maxing this thing out at full capacity that'll be just fine we need to go home depot pick up some of the supplies that we need to insulate the remainder of this house gaps and cracks all right so we got our loctite foam insulation let's get back to the house and i'll show you how to use it we picked up our loctite foam sealant for the windows and doors and that brings us to number three on our checklist for winterizing your home is insulating your windows and doors now to give you a demonstration of why insulating your windows and doors is important i'll be giving a little demonstration using an infrared thermal imager and what it is it's a very fancy thermometer that anything we point to it shows the image of it and it's going to indicate the temperature that we're looking at so the house is currently 72 degrees we're gonna be pointing right at this wall right here as soon as it ends right there we're looking at 70.1 degrees 71 right there as we bring it closer to where that trim piece is we're looking at 68.1 and then 66 as soon as we get to the glass this is insulated chances are this is not we're going to remove our trim cut the caulk all the way around remove our trim and we're going to use the loctite foam for windows and doors and insulate that area and i'll show you how and then after that we'll compare how it does before and how does after [Music] and i see some insulation and insulation is running and then it's stopping running and then stopping will some of them but against it but you still leave enough room for you know drafts to get through so what we're going to do we're going to use our loctite foam sealant for windows and doors we are going to apply it in all of these little cracks and crevices and let us do its job so as directions say shake it up for 30 seconds screw on the top get our protection on and now we can start applying it in these areas what's great about loctite tight foam is it's high density it has this uniform cell structure that allows for it to be extremely durable over time so i'm going to be very confident about this knowing that i'm not going to have to go and refinish this again anytime soon all right so i think we got it all um the instructions say we can let it dry for about an hour and then cut off any of this excess foam we'll place the trim boards back in place with brad nails all right it's been a little bit more than an hour as you can see everything is nice and dry i'm going to use a nice sharp razor blade and start cutting off the loctite tight foam and start installing the baseboards and the trim around and then we'll get our temperature for the after work all right moment of truth let's see what numbers we get all right here we go here's our wall 6970.172 let's move it up to the trim 70.1 70.9 oh hot doggy we did it these are small numbers yes they're two degrees but but ounces equals pounds that small little fractions that add up we're basically keeping this house in a way or creating this house in a way where we're retaining the heat that we're paying our hard-earned money to to heat and it's staying in here and it's not escaping through all these little hidden blind spots let's move on to number four let's go all right so number four on the list for winterizing your house is your gutters you gotta clean them out and you're probably thinking oh this is just another landscaping maintaining your home kind of thing no let me show you exactly why you want to do it come up here all right so if your house is anything like mine that has trees around it you're going to have this stuff coming to your gutters when water gets here this will start creating a dam right and it won't the snow will pack it and the the some of the snow behind it will create these water reservoirs basically a perfect dam scenario the water will build up go under your shingles under and behind your siding and they'll start creeping into the framing of your house and that'll be a lot of money that's going to cost you to get that fixed and that fixed so do yourself a favor grab yourself a bucket and just start cleaning it all out you know get it done don't start crying later because you need a new roof and a new frame now we got everything nice and cleared out and when we have snow packed up we're not worried about ice dams all right number five for fun things you need to do to winterize your home is these faucets outside if you haven't done so yet already disconnect your hose because chances are if it's the shadiest part like our house here the temperatures aren't rising and the water is already in here is going to be frozen and you're going to ruin yourself a hose which you know not the worst case scenario but save yourself the 30 bucks on a hose and do that number two these faucets right now they're fine the water's not terrible at all and some of them can actually have extension in the back some as far as like 12 inches to keep them from freezing up but sometimes they don't and unless you go down in your crawlspace there's only one way to find out is when something goes wrong so do yourself the favor spend the two bucks at your hardware store and get one of these faucet insulation all you got to do is take this little loop wrap it around the bottom part press the foam against your siding take this little pull tab and pull it in place and just like that we can now sleep comfortably at night knowing that both our faucet our water lines behind inside our crawl space and our garden hose are going to keep us from spending much more money next year all right number six on the list is gonna be our ac unit on the outside obviously at in the winter time with all the snow we're not using this puppy but here's the issue if we don't prep it as you can see there's no cover over it well you can't see watch this now you there's no cover so snow can accumulate on top go inside and start damaging the fan and all the other mechanisms that are that makes this puppy working in the summertime so what we need to do first of all is get rid of all these leaves around it make sure nothing's stuck on the sides there if you have a drain pan that's inside of it or on the outside make sure you suck up any of the water you don't want it to be freezing over and then at that point on we're going to start putting a cover on it to make sure snow doesn't accumulate on it [Applause] you can order yourself for about 70 bucks a cover that goes over this but we're going to save ourselves some money and do it the very cheap way this is a leftover piece of particle board i had obviously you can see i used to paint stuff with it and this is about six bucks worth of plastic material so what we're gonna do is we're gonna first lay down our plastic now i'm not a fan of covering this entire thing because though my thermostat is switched off from cooling from auto to just heating and not cooling i don't want you know somebody accidentally go and turn it on while i'm not home you don't touch the thermostat when that's not around so this way i'll keep the sides open start doing a little folding basically we're winterizing this board or weatherproofing the board use some staples secure it in place this is going to be the bottom side so we're not worried the reason why you want some overhang is when the snow comes it will land away from it and not go even inside slip around and just like that for a piece of scrap wood and six bucks later we got ourselves a nice cover that is uh field proof so nobody can accidentally turn on the ac unit and ruin it and at the same time it's got a good cover enjoy all right number seven on the list for winterizing your home is blowing out your sprinklers depending which part of the country you're in i grew up in seattle so we didn't really have irrigation sprinklers now in idaho we do because summers are like 100 degrees so to blow out your own sprinklers find your valve for the irrigation sprinklers once you establish the irrigation valve turn it off and this will disconnect it from the irrigation water now as long as our city water is not turned on or connected to for a water sprinkler irrigation system we'll be fine but let me show you we'll do our connection now this is our city water so once we get that turned off we can now come in here connect quick connect an air compressor and start turning on all the sprinklers the jets where they're all set up no water will be running through but now all we'll do is air will be pushing all the water that's left in the tubes or the piping completely out preventing them from freezing and cracking next spring you're required to have a large reservoir air compressor now that is a big one that's a 60 gallon air compressor plenty of reservoir i've done it with as small as a 12 gallon air compressor do not recommend it makes for a very long day but if you want to do it yourself you can but it's not too much of a deal breaker because depending on the size of your backyard or your sprinkler system you can have guys come over with a trailer air compressor system set up they can blow your sprinklers for as little as 25 bucks to as high as like 35 bucks so look around and that might be sometimes a little more you know more efficient way of doing things all right for number eight on the list for winterizing your home we're gonna talk about something extremely sexy insulating your windows now this technique i wouldn't really recommend to do it on inside the house so you can do it it might be a last resort if your windows are just shot and you're like i just need to get through one winter so my tax returns come in i can buy new windows this will work as well but most of this works for the garage what we have here is a window insulation kit they range in sizes based off of small medium or large windows very simple idea it comes with plastic it comes with double sided tape and you gotta bring your own hair dryer don't tell irena i took her hair dryer um it i i get in trouble for taking her stuff to start it off take the double-sided tape first and cover the entire perimeter they'll be working with what's interesting about these windows there's no trim around so this is a great alternative up next peel off the first part or the second part of the double-sided tape and then take this plastic it's going to look a lot better than you think watch you want to try to get it tight as tight as you can scissors and cut off this excess take the wives hair dryer and keep it four to six inches away from this stretching this material out [Applause] and boom just like that we have an insulated window as you can see it gets super tight just work your way with that heat it stretches the entire plastic now we've got the garage door window all insulated and done and i promise you i'll show you what i would do on the inside of the house windows which leads us to number nine on winterizing step let's go now moving to the inside of the house we have windows and these windows have caulking around between the trim and the window itself that keeps the draft from coming in i'm using an interior exterior caulking that is a high rated for elasticity to prevent it from cracking and i'm going to go over all these cracks there to seal them off now you definitely want to do this before temperatures get too cold because this stuff does not cure or set when it's too cold so do it before wet crazy cold temperatures drop in i'm going to finish off all the rest of the windows and then we'll move on to number 10. let's go number 10 on the list for winterizing your home is door seals as you can see behind me we have a door let me show you the problem with it as we come closer to it we have a gap for just a couple of bucks you can pick up one of these door seals make sure it's the right width of your door figure out the right direction of it oh looks like this one i got a trim like a hair let's try this again [Music] just like that no gaps now while we're still on topic of seals and doors these are seals that often time can go better it's really bright out there sorry about that they can often go bad so for about i don't know six seven bucks you can pick up one of these replaceable seals they go right into its place you can bring new seals so i just recently changed mine so that's why i don't have to do it now number 11 on the list is sealing off any gaps and cracks on the outside of your house now here's what i mean by it i have two premium ones right over here i think with the previous homeowner had an air compressor here or something like that and he had maybe the lines feeding in through here well guess what they're not sealed off and uh yeah that's basically bringing cold air into the garage where i work and that's a big no-no now what's great about this application is it says that it's uv resistant and this part as you can see gets a lot of sun during the day even during winter months it will get a lot of light but it's also gets really cold in wintertime so we're going to put this in place seal it up from here and the other side but just for fun let's see what our thermal imaging scanner tells us all right so this is the back side of the holes okay so here's the funny part uh so that's a window look it's showing heat markers right it's actually bringing heat in but it's 67-ish degrees uh in there and then it's uh 64 i guess so it's actually bringing in heat fortunately for us today is a really warm day and the sun's beating on that side so right now it's helping us but give it a couple more weeks and when it gets to five degrees fahrenheit it's uh nobody's gonna be laughing about it so i'm gonna throw some uh loctite uh tight foam in there and then we'll seal it off and i'll show you what it'll look like on a scanner afterwards all right let's see what our thermal imager says here so there's the window and uh see those little two black dots right there right there that's them and now no heat's coming in and of course when the colder temperatures come no cold will come in as well number 12 on the list for winterizing home saving a few bucks off of your energy bill is attic insulation traditionally they recommend having at least 12 inches of attic insulation above you throughout the entire area that way you keep the warm air in and the cold air from escaping out as well now most of the time you have to do much unless the builders didn't cover all the areas which you should still go up there and make sure for example my garage doesn't have attic insulation so i have to add some in there this is the baby's room and the top of the upstairs we're going to take a glance to see if we're missing anything and add some moof we need as well now let's go to attic and hopefully there's no ghost come on for the most part everything looked good except this part i added a ceiling fan here this last summer and this entire section is missing insulation so i'll have to go back in fill some of it up here and then we'll retain all the heat that we need in this bedroom number 13 on the list for winterizing your home and cutting down the energy bill is reversing your ceiling fan now the reason why you'd want to do that is because in the summer time you want to have it going counterclockwise like this where it's bringing nice cool air down at you but in the wintertime you want it to be counter-clockwise reason why is hot air is less dense than cold air so hot air rises and cold air settles down so by turning it clockwise it creates an upward draft that takes the hot air that's on top and starts circulating to the rest of the room to come you know move it around so to do this we're first going to turn this off let it come to a stop remove the cover over here you'll see a switch inside the housing here some fans will have it on the outside here as well flip it to uh clockwise now we have a fan going in a clockwise manner this is exceptionally important if you've done all the installation properly in your attic which the hot air stays and doesn't evaporate or escape through that this will work really well number fourteen on the list is check your smoke detectors the majority of these fires for some weird statistical reason happen in the winter times a lot of the times has to do with people running their furnaces and their boilers too hot they are bringing small space heaters in the house there's a lot of electrical things that could possibly go wrong so be sure to make a habit of testing all your smoke detectors once they're tested the second thing you need to do is is make sure you have a carbon monoxide detector on every floor and in every room of that floor carbon monoxide poisoning extremely dangerous it is extremely fast how it sets on and it will catch you by surprise so having a carbon monoxide detector on every floor and every room in the house will ensure your family safety besides are the floors and rooms for me i also think it's very important to keep one in the garage reason why in the morning time i also run one of those propane heaters yes i crack my garage door a little bit to get the ventilation out but at the same time by having a carbon monoxide detector in there at least be alerted how things are going and am i safe because you can't smell it it hits you last minute so be safe these are all battery operated and ready we'll have the two-year replacement ones and the 10-year replacement ones and the nice thing is they'll let you know if you know the battery's running low at the same time you don't have to wire anything in brilliant part so let's throw these around and we'll get to number 15. and number 15 the last and final checklist tip that i recommend you guys to winterize your home and save money along the way is get yourself a smart thermostat you don't have to get yourself the harvard of smart thermostat you can get yourself the public school of smart thermostats uh between 60 and 100 bucks get you a really nice one the great thing about them is that they're programmable so you can create a schedule you can create a schedule that if you're at work between 7 am and 5 pm then you can drop the temperatures therefore not putting a strain on your furnace or ac number two you could use it mobily when you're away so if you want to set it that you're like hey i'm coming back from camping whatnot you can turn it on and it will start heating your house again you can also set parameters we can want it to cool down to a certain temperature and heat up to another and keep it in a nice cushiony spot they recommend between 68 and 72 degrees that's what normal people not crazy people who just normal people my wife is always cold normal 68 to 72 degrees is it's a good number to be at it's not a crazy strain on your furnace an ac unit also there's statistics that are showing that by decreasing your temperature on your thermostat by one degree you're gonna be saving about one percent on your overall cost on your heating and cooling bill so by doing all these little things they all these ounces add up to pounds which will allow for us to be in that comfortable zone by the way my thermostat right now so 73 it's because my oven's on right now it's heating up kids want to eat pizza tonight hey that is it for me this week thanks so much for sticking around watching yet another one of my videos a big thank you to loctite for sponsoring this video and helping us winterize and save some money on our energy bill on this house loctite was gracious enough to sponsor a giveaway on my instagram account giving away a 250 gift card to home depot that you or any one of your friends could win by simply tagging them in the comments section so be sure to go over my social media to see all the rules and regulations how you can enter to win if you burn the channel and you like videos like this or any other kind of home improvement project or furniture build make sure hit the subscribe button and tap that notification bell that way you'll be alerted every time we put a video out like comment and share this video with your friends remember guys we are not trained professionals we are just not afraid to try and fail courage and sweat that's our motto tune out this week we'll see you guys on the next one see ya bye

Channel: Mr. Build It

Views: 522,255

Keywords: winterizing home, Top 15 Home Winterizing Tips, home winterizing, home energy saving tips, how to winterize your house, winter hacks, winterizing your home, winter preparation, home repair, how to, homeownership tips, pipe insulation, cold weather hacks, winterize home, how to winterize your home water pipes, how to winterize your home for vacation, how to winterize your home cheap, do it yourself spray foam insulation, how to winterize your house windows, mr build it

Id: PgEuSN4m754

Length: 22min 15sec (1335 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 13 2020