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Thinking of making your home more energy efficient? When you have a more energy efficient home, you can enjoy lower power bills, reducing your carbon footprint, and sometimes even tax incentives.
If you are planning to sell your home, making some home energy efficient upgrades beforehand can also help make the property more attractive to prospective buyers. It can boost your property value, giving you a better price for the sale. That is why we have put together this list of 10 DIY projects to help improve your home energy.
10 Tips To Improve Your Home Energy
1. Paint your roof a light color.
Each part of your home attracts and traps heat, including the roof. To help keep the roof from attracting and trapping heat in your home, you can repaint your roof in a lighter color since it tends to trap less heat than a darker color will.
You can also replace your entire roof with a material that is energy efficient and designed to reflect heat instead of absorbing it. By using one of these ideas for your roof, you can reduce your energy costs during the summer since your air conditioner will not have to work quite as hard to keep the home at a comfortable temperature.
2. Use energy efficient light bulbs.
A fast, easy, and affordable DIY project to improve your home energy is to replace all of your light bulbs with energy efficient ones. You can get LED bulbs, which will last significantly longer and consume much less energy.
There are even some that are ENERGY STAR certified to last about 15 times longer than an incandescent light bulb, and they can use up to 90 percent less energy than other bulbs. If you want to go a step further, you can invest in smart lights that can be controlled through an app to adjust the lighting and even turn a light off when you are not home.
3. Create shade to reduce cooling costs.
One easy DIY project to improve your home energy efficiency is to add some shade to your home exterior. You can build your own DIY shade screens to help block out the sun from getting into your windows during the summer months. These can be pretty easy to DIY build, and it can be done at an affordable price.
You can also plant some shady trees or bushes around the exterior of your home to help keep the sun from getting into your home. Make sure that they are kept pruned enough to not become a security risk.
Another way to add some shade to your home is to build a DIY awning or porch overhang to help cover more of the space. This can be an easy thing that you can build in a few hours that can make a big difference in your energy costs in the summer.
4. Invest in a smart thermostat to improve your home energy.
Smart thermostats have been rapidly growing in popularity, and for a good reason: they are a great way to control your home energy.
You can program a smart thermostat to change the temperature at certain times, so it goes down when no one is home but increases in temperature before anyone comes home, so they are greeted by a warm house.
Many can be controlled through apps, too, so you can adjust the temperature remotely. These can help decrease your home’s energy bill and improve your energy efficiency.
5. Reapply caulk and weather strips to cut down on drafts.
Do you have any air leaks in your home? You can find out for sure by lighting a candle and walking through each room, seeing if the flame is attracted to any of the windows, doors, or vents in the house.
Once you pinpoint the problem areas, you can spend time reapplying caulking and weather stripping to any of your windows and doors. This can help you improve the energy efficiency in your home by helping to keep your home insulated, so you will save energy trying to keep a room warm that is drafty and losing heat constantly.
6. Update your home’s insulation.
If your home is older, its insulation might not be doing its job anymore. You can add more insulation in the exterior walls of your home, as well as the attic, to help improve your insulation and reduce energy costs. If you are unsure of what areas of your home interior need to have new insulation, you can use the candle trick we mentioned above to identify those drafty parts of rooms where you need to install your new insulation.
For a more attractive insulation in your home, you can try installing faux stone or brick. It will give any room in your home a new look and feel, and it is an easy DIY project to help improve your home’s energy.
7. Get energy efficient kitchen appliances.
Your refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave, and oven, along with any other kitchen appliances you use regularly, can eat up a lot of your home energy costs.
A great way to improve your home energy is to replace these appliances with energy efficient ones. This can be an especially attractive thing for a prospective homebuyer, too, since they would be moving into a home that has energy efficient appliances.
8. Install ceiling fans to improve air circulation.
Another easy DIY project for your home is to install ceiling fans in the living room and bedrooms. This can help improve your home energy usage because it helps circulate the air, so your HVAC unit is not working as hard to heat or cool off an entire room.
There are some ceiling fans that are ENERGY STAR certified, too, which will help reduce your energy costs for keeping your ceiling fans running. Some suggest running your fans clockwise in the winter to help bring the warm air down from the ceiling and running it counterclockwise in the summer to help cool off the room, though not all fans offer that feature.
9. Get a new water heater.
The old storage water heaters continuously store and heat water in a tank when it is not being used, causing a major drain on energy usage. It is a little more expensive to buy an on-demand water heater that is tankless, but it can reduce your water bill and your energy bill.
If getting an on-demand water heater is out of your price range at the moment, you can instead add some insulation around your hot water heater, which will help keep that stored hot water even warmer and help reduce your energy usage.
In addition to insulating your water heater, you can wrap insulation around your hot water pipes to help reduce your costs in heating up the water. If your water takes a little while to heat up usually, insulating the hot water pipes can help make them heat up faster, which can also help reduce your energy costs.
10. Replace your windows and doors with energy efficient ones.
Your windows and doors can start getting leaky and drafty over time. If caulking and weather stripping are not cutting it for improving the energy efficiency in your home, consider replacing the doors and windows to reduce the drafts. There are windows with thicker panes to help improve energy efficiency, and you can find doors that help with that, too.
You may read this: The 10 Best Home Renovation Projects To Sell Your Home
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