5 Unusual Home Heating Tips to Try This Winter

Mother Nature Network’s Sami Grover offers a number of unique home heating strategies, the first being to heat the person rather than the house via appliances such as a heating mat to warm up dog beds, an incandescent heat lamp, or a skirt wrapped around the person’s desk. There also is compost heating, with one application being permaculture expert Chris Towerton’s experiments with a heat exchange system to run a radiator in one of his upstairs bedrooms. Grover also points to candle-powered room heaters, which are suggested by many to be a good source of emergency heat for people residing in small, rented homes. Linking residences to underground server farms to tap into the excess heat they generate is a proposal being put into practice in places such as Helsinki, Finland. A fifth atypical heating measure Grover lists is geo-solar systems, which manufacturers such as Enertia say enable homes to run on little to no supplemental heating or cooling except what is harvested directly from sunlight. “The passivhaus movement has also been spreading globally, with many homes built in cold climates that require no additional heat except for that which is generated from solar, body heat, and wasted energy from cooking,” Grover notes. | Read More