I like your site. Your texts are interesting. I got here by oversight as well as I started reading. I became interested in the topic and I am thinking it I could use your texts on my paper, of course with the quotation. Please contact with me, thank yo…

At night, a canopy of cloth around your bed raises the temperature ten degrees. It becomes a tent inside a room that can warm you up. A roll of tyvek housewrap, about $150, could be used to wrap the exterior of a small house over the siding. It will degrade in 4 or 5 months but it would be far cheaper than heating oil. The same roll could be used to tent off warm spaces inside the house sufficient to sit in comfortably.

Mother Earth News has published plans for home-made solar heaters that can be placed under windows with southern exposure. These are boxes with a glass face and a baffle to let air move through slowly. One of these can heat a moderate sized room during the day.

Barrels of water with anti-freeze can be used to store solar gains during the day and release them at night. Placed in a small greenhouse and vented supplemental heat can make a huge difference.

Avoid burning wood in a fireplace if you can purchase or rig any kind of wood stove instead. Even the most simple fireplace insert will give you much more useable heat and conserve fuel. Be careful that all internal wood fires are supplied with external feed air to prevent backdrafts.

Good luck.

I live in an apartment on the top floor immediately under the roof in a small apartment building (7 units). The summer heat, especially on humid days can indeed be unbearable. After many years of study and experimentation, I finally found a solution to my heat problem which does not require any A/C system. It turns out, that most of the heat in my apartment comes in via infrared radiation through the windows. In order to stop that heat infiltration, I installed OUTSIDE all windows a panel half an inch thick made of insulation boards sold by Home Depot. These boards are covered with aluminum foil on one side and are blue on the other side. All windows are completely covered except for the bottom foot of the window area. That bottom foot lets enough light to come in, so the apartment has enough daylight to feel comfortable. The difference is astounding! It is now cooler inside the apartment than outside. Morever, most of the summer I do not run any A/C anymore, only on days where outside temperatures exceed 95 degrees which are exceptional in the area where I live (NYC).

The lesson to learn from this example is: When A/C costs are getting high, instead of pumping the heat out using expensive electricity, take simple measures to prevent the heat entering your house in the first place. The amount of energy saved this way is very substantial.

The same remark applies of course in the winter. Instead of heating your house, investigate for ways to prevent the heat leaking out of your house. Most heat losses are due to air leakage, not radiation. The first step is to make your house much tighter with respect to air infiltration. That helps also during hot summer days.