- Loft hatch. Often just a board dropped in a hole. Warm air rises, finds it, and leaves. Draught strip and insulate the hatch itself.
- Floorboards and skirting gaps in older properties. Suspended timber floors with a ventilated void underneath, that's cold air moving under your feet. Sealant along the skirting line is cheap and effective.
- Under external doors. A brush strip is a few pounds.
- Old extractor fans and disused vents. Occasionally you find a hole straight to outside with nothing on it.
- Where pipes and cables go through walls. Behind the boiler, under the sink, at the meter.
- Chimneys you don't use. An open unused chimney is a permanent hole in your roof. A chimney balloon is about £20.
One important caveat. Do not seal everything. Homes need ventilation, for moisture, for cooking, and critically for any appliance that burns fuel. Never block airbricks or vents serving a gas appliance, open fire or stove. Sealing draughts around a working fire or a boiler flue is genuinely dangerous. Draught-proof the accidental gaps, not the deliberate ventilation. Cold, damp Lancashire winters plus an over-sealed house equals condensation and mould. Warm and ventilated beats warm and sealed. 2. Your heating controls: free, and most people have them wrong Almost every home has more control than the occupant uses, and the defaults are rarely right. Thermostatic radiator valves (TRVs). The numbered dials on your radiators. They are not volume controls, they are room thermostats. Setting one to 5 does not heat the room faster; it just heats it to a higher final temperature. Turn them down in rooms you don't use much, leave them up where you live. The exception: the room with your main thermostat should have its TRV fully open, or the two fight each other and neither works properly. Your programmer. Heat the house when you're in it and awake. That sounds obvious, but a lot of programmers are still running whatever schedule was set when the boiler went in, by an installer who had no idea what your day looks like. Ten minutes with the manual is worth more than most items on any tip list. Hot water. Often set to heat far more, far more often, than a household actually uses. If you have a cylinder, an hour or two a day is usually plenty for two people. One caveat if you have a heat pump. Some of the above reverses. Heat pumps prefer to run steadily at a low temperature rather than blast on and off, so the boiler habit of switching it off when you go out often costs *more*, not less. If you've a heat pump, ask your installer how it should be run, the advice is genuinely different. 3. Loft insulation: if you haven't got it, everything else is noise A quarter or so of heat loss in an uninsulated house goes through the roof. It's the cheapest fabric measure there is, it's non-disruptive, and it pays back faster than almost anything. Go and look. Genuinely, get the ladder out. People assume theirs is done, and often it was done in 1985 to a standard that's now less than half current recommendations. If you can see the joists, there isn't enough. And it may be free. More on the funding below.
The things worth doing, but don't expect miracles
Turning the thermostat down 1°C
This one is real and it is the most-repeated tip in Britain, so it's worth being precise. Lowering your thermostat by a degree does reduce consumption meaningfully across a whole heating season, because you're heating the house less for months on end. But two honest caveats. One: it only works if you're heating to a temperature you can afford to lose a degree from. If you're already at 18°C and cold, this is not advice, it's a suggestion to be colder. Being cold in your own home is not an energy saving strategy, it's a health risk, especially for older people, and it's how damp and mould take hold. Two: it does nothing at all if your TRVs and programmer are wrong, because you're still heating empty rooms at the wrong times. Fix the controls first, then consider the degree.
Servicing your heating
A boiler running badly burns more gas. A heat pump with a wrong or drifted weather compensation curve can cost noticeably more than one set up properly. Both are worth a look before winter rather than during it, when everyone's booked up and you're queuing behind emergencies.
Curtains closed at dusk
Genuinely real, and free. Windows are the weakest part of your wall, and a closed curtain traps a layer of still air against the glass. Close them when it gets dark, open them if the sun's out. Make sure they hang in front of the radiator, not over it, a curtain draped over a radiator sends its heat straight up the window.
Bleeding radiators
Worth doing if you have a problem, a radiator cold at the top with a warm bottom has air in it and isn't doing its job. Bleed it. But bleeding radiators that are already working fine achieves nothing, and it's on every list as though it's a universal saving. It isn't. It's a fix for a specific fault.
The overrated ones
Radiator foil
The idea: reflective foil behind a radiator bounces heat back into the room instead of into the wall. The reality: it only does anything on an uninsulated solid external wall. If the radiator's on an internal wall, the heat was going into your own house anyway. If the wall's insulated or cavity-filled, there's very little to reclaim. Now, Lancashire does have a lot of solid-walled housing, so this is worth more here than in a 1990s estate. If you're in a Victorian or Edwardian terrace with radiators on external walls, it's a tenner well spent. In a modern semi it's near-pointless. It is not, in any house, a substitute for insulation.
Standby
Switching things off at the plug saves a small amount. It's tidy and it's free and there's no reason not to. But it belongs at the bottom of the list, and it has nothing to do with your heating bill, which is the thing that actually spikes in winter.
If you're off the gas grid
A note for readers around the Lune Valley, rural Lancaster, Over Wyre, Garstang and Pilling, because standard advice assumes mains gas and a lot of homes here don't have it. If you're on oil or LPG, your unit cost is higher and more volatile than gas, which means every one of the fabric measures above is worth more to you than to a mains gas household. Same draught, more expensive heat escaping through it.
Practical points:
- Order oil early. Prices tend to firm up as winter bites and demand rises. Buying in summer is usually cheaper than buying in a January cold snap.
- Buying-group schemes exist. Several run across rural Lancashire, pooling orders for a better rate. Worth ten minutes' searching.
- Check your tank. Water ingress, sludge and a failing filter all cost efficiency.
It's also worth knowing there's currently a £9,000 Boiler Upgrade Scheme grant for off-gas homes on oil or LPG switching to a heat pump, up from the usual £7,500, running until 31 March 2027. That's a bigger decision than a draught excluder, but the economics off-grid are stronger than most people assume, precisely because the fuel you'd stop buying is expensive.