SPOKANE COUNTY, Wash. — With extremely cold temperatures in the Inland Northwest, keeping your whole house warm while saving on your electricity bill could be a challenge.
Avista shared with KREM 2 some of the tips people can follow to stay warm in their homes while keeping their energy bills as low as possible during this cold snap.
One of the tips Avista shared is if you see any daylight peeking through the doorframe, it actually means that cold air is coming in as well. By sealing up those gaps to make them more energy efficient, people can actually increase their energy efficiency by up to 10%.
"So a great guideline we use is if you can see daylight around your door, if you were to calculate the size of that holes just by being able to see the daylight it's about the size of a softball in hole size hole in your wall, so it'd be like having a big hole on your wall that just open to the outside," Levi Westra, an engineer with Avista said.
Here are some other tips you can use to keep your house warm:
- Cover gaps with your door snakes, closed drapes and blinds and cover windows with plastic.
- Start making choices about what temperature to keep your house at and or what rooms to heat or not to heat.
- Make sure to switch out your furnace filters and don't use space heaters if possible. They're more expensive to run.
- If you lose power to keep some of that heat inside, shut your doors to all the rooms in your house. Move everyone into one room because body heat will help keep everyone warm.
- If you have a natural gas water heater, you'll still have hot water in that situation, so you can fill up bottles with hot water to help keep you warm. Don't start burning things in your house unless you have a functioning fireplace.
- One other great local resource you can turn to in this time of winter is the SNAP app here, where you can apply for energy assistance and talk with snap representatives that will help walk you through what you can do to help keep your energy bill down.
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