Basic warm-ups
Maximize the effect of passive solar heat in winter. Keep all the curtains and shades open during the day on the side of the house where the sun comes in. (This is all day on the south side, morning on the east and afternoon on the west.) The warmth from the sun warms the floor and furniture. After sundown, close all the shades and drapes.
If you have the old type of storm windows that need to be installed each winter, it can get confusing figuring out which window goes where. To avoid this, use a screwdriver, a hammer and Roman numerals to mark each window frame. Tapping the screwdriver lightly with the hammer, indent the blade in the wood just enough to make any number needed. Then make corresponding marks in an inconspicuous part of the appropriate windowsill. Even if you repaint later, your marks will remain intact.
Before winter arrives, make sure registers and convectors are open, unblocked by furniture and rugs. Keep furniture from blocking off the flow of air to and from radiators.
For some additional winter heat and humidity, disconnect the exhaust to your clothes dryer and put a nylon stocking over the machine’s air outlet. The nylon will trap lint while releasing hot air and humidity into the house. (Be careful not to direct the hot air onto a wall or other potentially flammable object, and make sure you’re not creating a moisture problem.)

Dodge the draft
Stone foundations can be drafty when winter winds blow. In the fall, place a row of hay bales or bags of leaves snugly around the outside of the foundation; these will conserve heat come winter. It’s critical that your “banking” doesn’t come in contact with the house’s wood siding. If it touches the siding, it will conduct and trap moisture, damaging the wood.
A small crack under a board or at the sill line of a house can cause significant heat loss. Before winter arrives, inspect all around your sills and seal all cracks or holes with a caulking gun and flexible caulk. Flexible caulk remains pliable even at very low temperatures.
To repair big holes at the sill line or holes in hard-to-reach places, use expandable foam, available from hardware stores and sold in a pressurized can. Squirted into a hole, it expands and hardens to fill the spot.

Heat loss from the ground up
If you live in an older house, drafts may come up through cracks in the wood floors and even through your room-size rugs. To avoid this and create a useful vapor barrier, roll back all large rugs and lay down 4-mil polyethylene (plastic sheeting, available in rolls from hardware stores). In each instance, cut the polyethylene a few inches smaller than the rug. After installing the polyethylene, replace the rug. The room will be warmer, and the rug will hide your new insulator.
You can put 4-mil polyethylene under wall-to-wall carpeting, too. But don’t try this under scatter rugs; the plastic will make them slip around.
Perhaps the greatest source of heat loss in some homes is the sill plate, where the house meets the foundation. To prevent this, stuff fiberglass insulation between the joist ends and along the sill plate parallel to the joists.

Plug the leaks
In many homes, plenty of heat is lost through switch and outlet holes. To stop a lot of leaking, remove the switch plates and seal behind the hardware with canned foam insulation, available from hardware stores. It’s easy to remove the dried foam if you ever need to work on the outlet or switch later.

Strip joints
Weather strip is an obvious but effective tool for sealing in heat. If you’re not sure what kind to use around your windows, try the rope like coils of semi-soft putty. They’re easy to use and inexpensive. Around doors, install felt weather strip, which is very durable.
Silicone caulk is more expensive than most other types, but it’s the best type to use for weatherproofing because it stays flexible at just about any temperature. Most other caulks get hard and crack. Use silicone caulk around windows, along sill lines, between the cracks of a log cabin- virtually anywhere you need weatherproofing.

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