What Are the Best Ways to Prep Your Home for Winter?

Pittsburgh Real Estate Podcast with Gina Giampietro

There are a variety of precautions you can take to prepare your home for winter. Today we’ll go over the most important ones.

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What can you do to get your home ready for winter?

Let’s starts with the outdoors. Any outdoor water hoses need to be drained and shut off. AC unit lines should also be drained and shut off at the valve. Your whole AC unit, in fact, should be blanketed with a waterproof cover. As for your furnace, replace the filter and have it fully serviced by a professional so that you aren’t worrying about it breaking down in the middle of a blizzard.

What about the inside? Start by considering installing a programmable thermostat. This will allow you to reduce your energy costs by programming the home for a lower temperature while you’re away and then normalizing it before you get back home so you can walk into a toasty interior.

In case you didn’t know, ceiling fans can provide as much warmth as they do coolness. How? By reversing their blades. This will help keep the warm furnace air down.

You don’t want your furnace to break down in the middle of a blizzard.

To prevent drafts, there are a variety of ways to cover your home. If you have older windows, you can put plastic on them. If you have thin curtains, you can replace them with thermal curtains. You can also replace all the weather stripping around your doors.

Finally, don’t forget to clean the chimney. Everybody likes a roaring fire during the winter, so if you have a fireplace, before you toss a few logs on the grate, make sure the chimney is swept out and clear of any debris.

If you have any questions about this or any other topic or you have a topic in mind that you’d like me to discuss in a future video, please feel free to give us a call or email us anytime. We’d be happy to help you!