A Creative Way to Insulate Windows

Tomorrow it is going to be 10 degrees for our high here in Akron Ohio and our apartment is not exactly the best insulated structure. Lats winter our electric bill went up 600%! Which is quite obnoxious. So this year we have decided to take some extra precautions to help ease our usage of electricity.

The first thing we did was go out and buy a ceramic heater that does not use a lot of watts to run. Our electric heaters that run along our base boards are old and very inefficient. We thought that maybe by using a different source of heat would help re-leave our budget. This helped but if we wanted to heat the upstairs we either had to carry it up every night or turn on the wasteful baseboard heaters.

We then bought a oil heater which works beautifully. It took a little while to heat up the room temp to our desired temperature but it maintains the heat almost effortlessly. Until now. With the temperatures plummeting below freezing it is starting to get hard to use only these two heat sources. We were not about to go and buy another heater nor do we want to turn on the base boards.

I started to then think where we loose most of our heat or where does most of the cold air "draft" from. The answer: our windows. They are not double paned glass and the seals allow much to be desired. They are also are mounted on marble window sill which go through to the outside. If you know anything about marble, it retains cold very well and therefor pulls the cold air into our apartment. As we cannot change either our windows or the marble the rest on we had to come up with a different solution.

Now we recycle and recently bought a shredder. After emptying the shredder into a plastic giant eagle bag I realized it fits on out window sill. What if I were to line these up in a row? With this idea in mind my boyfriend and I started shredding paper to fill bags, as well as taking some yarn and placing those into bag. After lining them up on the window sill, it didn't look to pretty. My boyfriend suggested rolling them in old sheets. Voila! It adds a little extra padding and it makes it look neater than a line of giant eagle bags.

Please feel free to try this little trick. We will see this week if it actually helps or not, but I think it will!