Free and cheap ways to insulate and heat a private house: 4 tips

A country house is the dream of any city family, and today many people can afford this pleasure. In this case, we are not talking about a banal dacha, which is adapted only for summer vacations, but about a real winter dwelling. You can also leave aside and elite cottages, whose share in suburban construction, despite the huge number of advertising brochures, is rather scanty. We are talking about the so-called budget developers who save literally every penny, and are not able to afford the highest quality materials, but at the same time they are trying to build a house that would not require excessive heating costs during winter operation.

The huge capacities of the construction industry today are aimed at providing the suburban segment of this market. Especially for "state employees", "light" types of concrete were invented, which, according to manufacturers, are capable of providing high quality of inexpensive buildings. The range of insulation materials, as well as waterproofing materials, has greatly expanded, which to some extent can also contribute to the heat saving of a low-rise building. As you can see from the statistics, the most popular for the construction of walls for private houses are aerated concrete and foam concrete blocks, which are much cheaper than bricks, and with proper insulation of concrete facades, they can compete with it. However, as practice shows, the costs of heating any buildings today are very high, even for those made of wood using frame technology.

Private house problems

In theory, frame houses are the "warmest" ones, but in practice this turns out to be far from the case. The heat capacity of the frame walls is very small, so that such a house is constantly warm in winter, it needs to be very well heated, and this is quite large expenses. Someone will say that in the Nordic countries, for example, in Norway and Finland, frame houses occupy more than 90% of the entire suburban construction segment. This is true, but houses there are heated exclusively by electricity, and electricity in Norway, Sweden or Finland is very cheap, even cheaper than it once was in the USSR. The fact is that in these countries there are a huge number of rivers, including mountain ones, on which even more power plants have been built, both large hydroelectric power plants and miniature, almost private ones. Thus, these countries are very strongly electrified, and imperceptibly little money is spent on heating frame houses. For example, in the lowlands of France or Germany, frame houses are not built, because there are not so many water-based electric generators. The same is observed in our country - if frame houses are being built somewhere in the Moscow region, it is only for advertising purposes, but it is really convenient to live in such houses somewhere in the Crimea or Stavropol region, where winter temperatures rarely drop below zero. ...

So, the problem of economical heating of private suburban dwellings in our country is very acute, especially in regions with a cold climate, where frosts of up to 30 degrees are not uncommon. On such days, the heating works with might and main, absorbing significant funds. Of course, wealthy homeowners are not afraid of such expenses, but, as we said, these are less than 10% of all the rest.The need to pay large sums for fuel (gas, electricity, coal, or whatever) imposes a heavy burden on the bulk of "state employees", which very often greatly poisons life in a country house, does not allow you to truly enjoy coziness and comfort.

But there is a category of people who cope with this problem quite successfully, attracting the forces of nature to their service. And although they are not particularly well versed in the physics of natural phenomena and the chemistry of substances, they are perfectly able to communicate with their neighbors and construction specialists who know all sorts of secrets of free heating and insulation at home. We are, of course, not talking about special tools with low payback, such as solar panels or wind turbines, although they, of course, can also be used in common business. We will tell you about several "old-fashioned" and more modern techniques with which you can reduce heating costs by 70%, if you approach the matter thoroughly and wisely.

The sun is like a heater

The first technique has long been known even to schoolchildren, and is used on a small scale by some homeowners, however, as they say, not to the fullest. It consists in the fact that the sun's rays, penetrating into the house through the windows, heat the furnishings that stand in their way. These objects accumulate solar energy, and later release them into the room air, heating it. If this effect is used not according to the possibilities, but purposefully, then in theory it is possible to heat the house only with the sun's rays. But this is in theory, but in practice in winter the sun does not shine every day in the sky, and on cloudy days the house cannot be heated in this way. However, in any winter there are enough sunny days to significantly reduce the heating intensity. You can even accumulate energy in the most natural way, which will then be used when the sun is hidden behind the clouds. Some craftsmen put mirrors on the roof, which focus the sun's rays on containers with water, which heats up and enters the kitchen, bathroom, and even heating radiators, depending on the temperature to which it can be heated.

But still, the main option is to heat the premises directly by the sun's rays. To do this, you just need to put large windows with reinforced double-glazed windows on the south side of the house. Reinforced they are needed so that at night the heat does not go outside through the windows. Of course, such double-glazed windows are not so cheap - you will have to pay a tidy sum for them. But this money will be recouped in the very first winter, and in the future this option will begin to bring considerable income, consisting in fuel economy. Sunlight should fall on objects that have a high heat capacity and are colored dark. For example, if you put a small cast-iron figurine in front of the window, and direct sunlight will fall on it all day, then by sunset it will be so hot that it will simply be impossible to pick it up. If you leave it overnight in a small unheated room, then the heat from this figurine will not allow the temperature to drop significantly in the room until morning. Of course, everything here depends on the mass of the object to be heated, but there are no special problems with this, because the solar energy is dimensionless, you can also heat a brick partition painted in dark colors, which is located in the room in front of the window. Such a partition will accumulate in itself as much heat as it penetrates through the window, it is for this window that more needs to be done.

We use the veranda

Most of all, those homeowners who have prepared a project for these purposes in advance and have built their energy-saving house not using any special, often incomprehensible and initially expensive technologies, save on insulation most of all. It is much easier to understand the essence of things and try to avoid conditions that can cool the walls very much in winter.After all, it is no secret that most of the heat goes away precisely through the walls, and insulation will not help much here, because the insulation layer is part of the wall, and it is very well cooled by the outside cold air. Therefore, it is necessary to insulate the walls in a more radical way, for example, with the help of a veranda.

A veranda is often an indispensable attribute of any country house. On the veranda in the summer, you can perfectly relax, dine, move the summer kitchen there, even sleep on it on stuffy nights. But many homeowners are using the veranda incorrectly. They place it on the sunny side of the house, and then it turns out that in the summer it is impossible to be on such a veranda due to the heat. And in winter, when it is glazed, the temperature in this room, although it is higher than outside, does not contribute to the heat saving of the house, since the bulk of the cold passes through the rear, northern wall, which is not illuminated by the sun even on the clearest days. And when the north wind blows, the heat is blown out of the wall almost without interruption. Therefore, the veranda should be placed along this wall - in winter it will perfectly protect the walls from wind, moisture and freezing, and in summer it will be cool and comfortable on it.

You should also pay attention to the roof, because a lot of heat also goes out through it. In the case of an unheated attic, this is quite easy to do - you need to insulate the floors well and seal them with waterproofing material. But what to do if the attic is inhabited, because the gentle slopes of the attic are not so easy to insulate - it is possible to create the most airtight carpet from the same mineral wool on the floor. And by laying it under the slopes between the rafters, it will not be possible to tightly strengthen the insulation, there will always be gaps between the plates or rolls, through which warm air will surely find its way out. To prevent this from happening, it is enough to take ordinary aluminum foil and glue all the slopes and walls with it, especially you need to try in the corners where the most significant heat leaks occur. Foil does not absorb heat, but literally reflects it from itself, preventing leaks, this is the property of this material, which for some reason even today is used in a very small volume, and then mainly in industry, and not in suburban housing construction.

We fill the underground with slag

Well, it's time to finally move on to the foundation. Heat also escapes through the floors, and if the house does not have a basement, then it goes directly into the ground. Of course, the ground under the house never freezes and its temperature never drops below zero, especially if the foundation is slab and not strip. But the problem here is not in the ground, but in thin floors. If you are planning to install a "warm floor" system in the floor, then cement screed alone will not be enough. Do not put ordinary insulation under the screed, it will begin to deteriorate under the influence of heat. Therefore, the best option is to cover the subfloor with a thick layer of slag, which keeps heat very well, and in case of an excessive amount, it gives it back up. The main thing is to make good waterproofing under the slag layer, which consists of a sand cushion covered with roofing felt with glued seams. Slag does not deteriorate either from heat or cold, it is durable under any conditions and will not allow heat to leak into the underlying soil.

Never line up in the hills

And one more small but very important nuance. Never build your country house on top of a hill. It is clear that a beautiful view of the surroundings opens up from a height, but when winter comes with its frosty winds, they will methodically begin to knock out all the heat from the walls and roof of your house, no matter how well they are insulated. Of course, you can plant trees in front of the house in dense rows, which will hold back the wind, but then the beautiful view from the window will disappear. So what's the point of building a house on a hill?

Of course, these are far from all the "tricks" with which you can heat a house for free and insulate it reliably. There are many more nuances that some savvy homeowners use very widely.But even if you take into account all of the above and skillfully apply these methods in the construction and arrangement of your suburban housing, you can save more than half of all the money spent on heating that your neighbors spend.