The No-Brainer Ways to Cut Heating and Cooling Costs

You may not be ready to replace your heating and cooling system with a heat pump, but there are still simple ways to reduce your energy costs and carbon emissions.

Home Energy Conservation: The No-Brainer Things That Actually Save Money

You don’t need to replace your entire HVAC system to make your house more energy efficient. There are a handful of cheap, relatively simple things you can do to lower your heating and cooling bills, make your house more comfortable, and reduce your carbon emissions. Unlike some of the big-ticket home upgrades, you can do many of them yourself. 

The trick is knowing where to spend your time and money.

A lot of homeowners start with windows. Or they get a quote for thousands of dollars of insulation work. Or they pay someone to perform an energy audit.

There are better places to start.

If your goal is to reduce heating and cooling costs at home, I’d start with three things: control your thermostat, seal air leaks, and improve insulation where it’s easiest to do.

Start With an Energy Audit

An energy audit can be a useful way to figure out where your house is losing energy. But not all energy audits are created equal. 

The quality of the audit depends on the person doing it, and there’s always the possibility that an auditor’s recommendations are influenced by who they work for or what services their company sells. That doesn’t mean the recommendations are wrong, it just means that you should treat the report as a starting point.

Three No-Brainer Ways to Improve Home Energy Efficiency

Use Your Thermostat More Strategically

If you don’t already have a programmable or smart thermostat, this is probably the easiest place to start. 

The basic idea is simple: don't spend money heating or cooling an empty house. Let the temperature move up when you're away in the summer and down when you're away or asleep in the winter.

For a typical 3,000-square-foot house, those adjustments can save roughly 5-10% on heating and cooling costs, depending on the house, climate, and how aggressively you adjust the temperature.

If you have a heat pump with electric resistance backup, there's another wrinkle. Some thermostats can trigger the backup system when they try to bring the house back up to temperature too quickly. Because resistance heat is much less efficient, that's something you want to avoid when possible.

A good smart thermostat can gradually recover the temperature instead.

It's not a glamorous upgrade. But it costs very little and can start saving money immediately.

Seal the Holes in Your House

Here's one of the weird things about houses: a tiny gap in the right place can waste a surprising amount of energy.

Your house has a boundary that separates conditioned indoor air from the outside. Any place where that boundary has a hole is an opportunity for heated or cooled air to escape.

The attic is one of the biggest places to look.

Check around plumbing vents, electrical penetrations, recessed lights, chimneys and flues, and the attic access hatch. Look for obvious gaps and seal them with the appropriate materials.

The attic hatch is particularly easy. Adding foam weatherstripping can dramatically improve the seal, and making sure the hatch fits tightly can stop a surprising amount of air movement.

Then look downstairs.

Seal gaps around pipes, wires, and other utility penetrations, as well as the places where the house meets the foundation. Expanding foam can be useful for many of these small openings.

If you want to know exactly how leaky your house is, a blower-door test can quantify it. But you don't necessarily need a sophisticated test to find some of the biggest, most obvious holes.

Professional air sealing can cost $2,000-$3,000 or more. The DIY version can cost a fraction of that.

And you don't need to seal every square inch of your house to see a benefit. Start with the places you can actually see and reach.

Add Insulation Where It Matters Most

Once you've sealed the obvious air leaks, look at insulation.

The attic is usually the easiest place to start. If you already have insulation up there, you may not need to rip it all out. In many cases, you can simply add more loose-fill insulation over the existing material, increasing the amount of insulation and reducing heat flow through the ceiling.

It's not the cleanest DIY project in the world. You'll want protective clothing and a good respirator, and crawling around an attic full of insulation isn't exactly a Saturday afternoon at the beach.

But compared with paying several thousand dollars for the same basic improvement, it's worth considering.

Above-grade basement walls are another good target. Foam board or spray foam can improve the thermal performance of these walls, particularly if you're able to do the work yourself.

What I wouldn't rush to do is tear open your exterior walls to add insulation. It's possible. It can also be expensive, disruptive, and difficult to justify financially.

The basic principle is simple: start with the parts of the house that are easy to access and where you're likely to get the biggest improvement for the money.

Be Careful With the Window Sales Pitch

Windows are where energy-efficiency advice can get expensive very quickly.

Replacing old, single-pane windows with modern double-pane windows can certainly make a house more comfortable and reduce heat loss. If your windows are broken, rotting, or have failed seals, replacing them may make perfect sense.

But replacing perfectly functional windows solely to save energy is a different calculation.

A whole-house window replacement can easily cost $10,000 or more, while the annual energy savings may only be a few hundred dollars. At that price, you're waiting a long time for the energy savings to pay back the investment.

That's why I'd put windows behind air sealing and insulation on the priority list for most homeowners.

If you're trying to improve home energy efficiency on a budget, don't assume the most visible upgrade is the most valuable one.

Where I'd Spend the Money

First, deal with the cheap stuff: thermostat controls and obvious air leaks.

Then look at insulation in the attic and above-grade basement areas.

Only after that would I start thinking about expensive projects like whole-house window replacement.

And there's an opportunity cost here. If you have $10,000 to spend on making your house more efficient, you don't have to spend it on windows. Depending on your house and your goals, that money might have a bigger impact on something like a heat pump, solar panels, or an electric vehicle.

The point isn't that every house needs the same upgrades. It's that you should look at the actual numbers before spending the money.

How Much Can Energy Efficiency Save?

There's no single answer because your potential savings depend on your home's size, climate, insulation levels, heating system, electricity and fuel prices, and how much energy you're currently using.

But the order of operations matters.

Cheap measures like thermostat adjustments and DIY air sealing can produce savings without a major upfront investment. Attic insulation can provide another meaningful improvement where insulation levels are low.

More expensive projects need to be evaluated differently. A $10,000 window replacement isn't automatically a good energy investment just because the new windows are more efficient.

The right question is:

How much energy will this project save, how much will it cost, and what else could I do with that money?

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