The One Warm Room Trick That Cut Our Heating Bill in Half

Billy Ray McCoy3 minute read

The woodstove in the McCoy cabin, with a quilt hung over the doorway to keep the heat in one room

Mamaw Pearl never heated a room nobody was sitting in. Every winter she picked one room, shut the rest of the house off, and kept that one room warm on about half the wood the neighbors burned.

Most houses today heat every room all day, the empty ones too. That is where a big part of the winter bill goes. Here is how Mamaw did it, the way she showed me.

1. Pick the room you live in

Choose the room where you already spend your evenings. It should be small, with the fewest outside walls and windows. A kitchen or den next to the stove or the furnace vent works best. A big room with a high ceiling is the hardest to keep warm.

2. Shut the rest of the house off

Close the doors to the rooms you are not using. Where there is no door, hang a heavy quilt or a blanket over the doorway with a curtain rod or a few nails. Roll up a towel and lay it along the bottom of every outside door.

Works every timeA quilt over a doorway keeps the warm air where you are. You can feel the difference the first night.

Old talkClosing every heat vent in a house with a furnace does not save much. It can strain the system. Close a few in the rooms you shut off, not all of them.

3. Keep the sun, keep the dark out

Open the curtains on the sunny side in the morning and let the sun do some of the work. Shut every curtain the minute the sun goes down. Heavy curtains, or a blanket pinned over a drafty window, keep a lot of heat from walking out through the glass.

4. Heat the bed, not the bedroom

Mamaw never heated the bedroom at night. She warmed the bed. An hour before bed she filled a jar or a hot water bottle with warm water from the kettle, wrapped it in a towel and put it under the covers at the foot. Flannel sheets and a wool blanket did the rest.

With the bed warm, you can turn the heat down for the night. Turning the thermostat back 7 to 10 degrees for the eight hours you sleep can take around a tenth off a year's heating bill on its own.

Be careful: never heat a room with a gas oven, a grill or a generator. They put out carbon monoxide, which you can't see or smell. If you use a space heater, plug it straight into the wall, keep it three feet from anything that burns, and turn it off when you leave the room. Keep a carbon monoxide alarm near where you sleep.

What it did for us

The first winter we did this again, the way Mamaw did, our heating bill came in at about half of the winter before. Your house will be different, but one warm room costs a lot less than a whole warm house, and it feels warmer too.

Billy Ray