4 Easy Tips to Heat and Cool Your Home In an Instant

Keeping your home cool throughout the summer and warm during the winter is challenging, no matter the season. It becomes doubly as hard when you aren’t even able to make any structural changes to the home. Here, we share four easy tips on how to heat and cool your rooms in an instant!

Closed Off Areas

This is perhaps the easiest temperature control method to action — simply get up and shut the door! This works to trap and concentrate cool or warm air in a particular part of the home. If you live in a two-story home for example, the ground level is likely to be cooler and you can help matters by shutting the door to the top level. Similarly if you are heating the home, close as many doors as possible to trap warm air in only the rooms you are occupying.

Install Curtains

Curtains and blinds are not just for prettying up windows, they also have remarkable powers of insulation. Glass is a fantastic conductor of temperature, magnifying heat in summer and becoming cold as ice in winter. A curtain or blind acts as a barrier, blocking out the sun’s hot rays in summer and trapping in the toasty internal air during winter. If your home has curtains or blinds, start using them. If not, they’re easy to install some for a very affordable cost.

Go Portable

Reverse-cycle air conditioners traditionally do a good job of heating and cooling the home, however, these are quite costly and would require landlord permission to install so aren’t a likely option for many of us. Luckily, there’s a number of portable air-conditioning units, fans, and heaters on the market that are almost as effective as their larger counterparts. Portable fans come in a wide range of prices, shapes, and sizes, so it’s fairly easy to find one that will suit the room you need to cool. Some newer fans on the market, like the Dyson Hot+Cool Air Purifier (Buy on Amazon, $544.99) will also heat up a room throughout the colder months. Portable air-conditioning units also come in a variety of styles from desktop and USB-chargeable compact devices to larger products that require a window to vent through.

Block Gaps

Similar to shutting doors and closing the curtains you should block any noticeable gaps. The most common offender is gaps underneath doors, which create unpleasant drafts throughout the home. You can buy purpose-built draft stoppers like MAGZO Under Door Draft Blocker (Buy on Amazon, $23.95) or simply roll up an old towel to block the gap.

This article originally appeared on our sister site, Homes to Love.