If you have forced air heating with ducts running through unheated areas (basements and crawlspaces), you should tape them up to seal any leaks. Every seam will leak heated air where you don’t need heat. Don’t use duct tape! Buy aluminum tape instead. It’s more expensive, but not horribly so. Duct tape will peel away after a couple years. After doing this, you could also wrap some insulation around the duct work.
The thread by Mjollnir is the one I was TRYING to post, although the suggestions are all welcomed. Apparently my search skills are lacking.
BunnyGirl - I never thought about the gaps adding up to a single hole size before…what a shocker! There are a couple of weatherstrips I will need to upgrade this weekend.
Any idea if they sell the plastic window stuff for picture windows?
The attic is insulated well (extra bats up there in the last few years), and we just had to redo the basement due to a flood and added R-12 (to make R-20) to a couple of the walls that we drywalled (there are a couple that we haven’t touched yet). We currently have an electric dryer, and I think I saw some sort of automatic baffle that redirects the air inside when the humidity of the exhaust air is low enough.
[hijack-of my own thread]
One other problem that we have is in the basement, the hot air vents are in the ceiling and the warm air just pools at the ceiling. I need to break into the cold air return system and set a vent at floor level to grab the cold air. All the hot vents are in the middle of the rooms which makes it difficult to drop the vents to floor level. We installed a ceiling fan last year, but it seems to make the room cool rather than help.
[/hijack]