House For Sale Carstairs: Three simple steps to cut the heating bill when building your home

Are you looking for a house for sale in Carstairs Alberta? Is owning an energy efficient home for sale important to you? Here is a video showing an energy efficient home for sale in Carstairs AB and you can read below for 3 things you can do when building your home that really cut down on your heating bill.

Winters in Canada can get long and cold indeed, and that means it's more expensive for you to heat your home during these long winter months. If you're building your home, there are several things you can do to make sure to have energy efficiency in your home and save money into your future, too. These tips can help you conserve and help the environment, too, because you'll need less energy to heat your home.

Instead of building your home with outside walls that are one foot thick, consider building it with outside walls that are two feet thick. This thing you can get even more insulation between the double walls. Before you build the inside wall, build a vapor barrier over the insulation. This will also help you maintain climate control within your home. In addition, heat will not "leak out" because wiring and electrical plugs do not puncture the vapor barrier. You won't have cold air leaking in through your outlets on those long, dark winter days.

With these thicker double walls, you can also eliminate thermal bridges from the outside of your home. What is a thermal bridge? A thermal bridge occurs when cold air is transmitted through the walls to the inside, such as via studs in the outer wall to the inner wall. When studs on the outer wall touch inner wall studs, they in effect transmit the cold to the interior. One way to eliminate these types of thermal bridges is to make sure that inner and outer wall studs are inserted offset from each other so that they never touch; instead, each of the studs will touch the insulation instead of the other wall.

Next, let's look at your windows. Having energy-efficient walls is great, but it's not going to mean a whole lot if your windows aren't efficient, too. These days, there are lots of different brands of energy-efficient windows available on the market, and all of them are competitively priced. You also have to be careful when you're installing these windows, though, because windows' edges are a weak spot whereby cold can easily get in if they aren't sealed properly.

When you're building, this is the time you should pay attention to installing new windows properly. Before you put up the inner wall, surround the window you're going to install and any gaps with a lot of insulation. One of the ways to fill in the gaps very effectively is to rip the insulation into smaller pieces. Make sure to properly fill in the gaps and holes, or you'll have leaks that will cost you energy efficiency and comfort in the future. You'll need to have a vapor barrier for best energy efficiency, and therefore an airtight seal. Caulking can also be used to get this if insulation doesn't do the job all by itself.

If your house is going to have a furnace, you should still take advantage of passive solar heat if you can. Using large windows is very in style these days and will also allow the sun's heat to penetrate into your home. This provides you a heat source that is absolutely free. And on hot summer days, you can cover these windows up to prevent excess heat from entering your house. If you have large windows facing winter sun and thick walls, you'll have substantial control over the heat level in your home, and much of it can be provided free of cost. Done right, these types of energy savings will make sure your home stays warm in the winter and cool in the summer with fewer energy costs and less energy waste.

Besides solar and other "passive" energy sources for heat, you'll likely also need another heat source. One of the means by which you can do this is through a furnace. Even if you do install a furnace, though, you'll likely run it much less frequently than you would in a non-energy-efficient home. You'll see that having an energy-efficient home is going to save quite a lot of money in this way. If you're particularly adventurous, you may not want to install a furnace at all and instead may wish to go with a wood-burning stove. As long as your home as well insulated and has 2-foot walls, and as long as your windows are properly installed, a wood burning stove should comfortably heat your home for about the same cost over an entire winter as a single month's heating bill would be in a traditional, non-energy-efficient home. You may also wish to consider geothermal heating or in floor heating instead of a furnace installation.

Using these few simple ideas when building your home can add up to substantial savings over the life of your home as well as make a big difference to the environment. And of course if you're not ready to build but you want to live in the calgary area you can always look for a house for sale in Carstairs AB