This past winter was very cold for us in Canada. I’m lucky because I live in the warmest part of Canada. Our temperatures never drop below -5 degrees celsius.
It gets really, really cold as you head east towards Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario. We’re also located very close to the United States border. But it was still a very cold winter for us.
My family was complaining to me non stop about being cold. Like many homes in this city, ours was built in the late 1950’s and had been through a couple of renovations. Unfortunately they were all cosmetic ones. No thought went into the heating or windows. So much air escapes through the walls and windows in this home.
I couldn’t take it anymore so I decided to look at ways we could improve heating our home. Clearly the baseboard heaters weren’t doing the trick. We could have had better insulation installed along with new windows. But we’d have to leave the home for a few weeks. I wasn’t into paying for a hotel room as we have no relatives in the city or friends I’d feel comfortable asking if we could stay at their place.
So I started to do some research on how to solve this problem. I then talked to my friend who is a general contractor and asked him. He mentioned a couple of methods of I had never thought of.
Both were going to solve the problem very fast and not cause an inconvenience for us.
The first was blown in cellulose. It’s like insulation as it fills the walls. But instead of that awful pink stuff, it’s made of fibers. They punch a tiny hole in your walls and blow it in to fill up the areas where the current insulation is letting air through.
This was going to be a quick fix as the contractors would need only two days to do the whole house. We could live with that.
But it was the other option that made more sense.
We ended up getting a heat pump from Red Blue Heating and Refrigeration. It was a more expensive option that blown in cellulose. However, it was going to help us for summers as well.
Which is great because as summer nears, we’re already experience warm weather here and the heat pump is working to extract the warm air from our home to the outside. It’s part of the reverse cycle that heat pumps provide and why they can benefit you in the summer months.
So if you have this same issue, look into getting a heat pump. They will warm your home in the winter and cool it in the spring. It’s a double-headed attack which pays itself off. Instead of having to use a air conditioner in the summer and a furnace or baseboards in the winter, you can just get a heat pump and it will work for both seasons and keep your home the comfortable temperature.
