The Super Official Homeowners Thread

[WRXtranceformed]

Yeah if you can feel air coming through your door and windows, get some kind of foam "stop" that you can put on the inside at the floor. It's not the permanent or correct fix, but you're just renting the place so you don't need to burn up a lot of cash on it. If you can still see daylight around the sides of the door they need to come back out and fix that. You lose 70-80% of the energy in your home through your windows, and I promise yours are trash, so you may want to look into those window sealing kits or at the very least check the caulking around the edges and see if the property mgmt company needs to come and redo it. Since you're renting you obviously aren't going to replace the windows so you'll have to deal with uninsulated panes and frames.

I should add that we also like to sleep really cold so in the summer we crank the AC down to like 66 or 67 at night and keep it around 70-72 during the day. Most recommendations are that you never drop the thermostat below like 75 in the summer for maximum energy efficiency but that's crazy talk. If we did that, I don't think we'd ever break 1500kwh

---

I'll add that I helped two friends start an energy efficient window and siding company here in Charlotte years ago. As another note on the windows, for most of our big home installations people were seeing upwards of $400-500/mo heating bills before the swap and then overnight after the installation their energy costs would drop by 50-60%. Granted these were really high end windows but if you own a home and you still have old wood windows or even 90s-early 2000s vinyls, there is a cost savings that nets out the cost of the windows (which are not cheap) if you live in the home for a long time.