🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com Put your hand flat on your window tonight. Not the frame, the glass. Hold it there for the count of ten.

That cold coming into your palm is your heat going out. All winter, every hour, the stove or the furnace makes warmth and it drifts across the room and lays itself against that pane and goes straight through to the outdoors. A single sheet of window glass is one of the poorest things a house is made of for holding heat.

You can have a snug house with a handful of big old windows in it and still be heating the yard. The usual answer is new windows, which is a very large sum of money and in an old house often the wrong answer anyway. There is another answer, and it is about as old as glass.

My grandmother showed me on a cold morning when I was nine. My grandfather had hung the storm sashes on the parlour but not yet on the kitchen when the first real cold came. In the morning the kitchen window was thick with frost on the inside and water running down onto the sill.

The parlour, same wall, same night, was clear. She had me put a hand on each. The kitchen glass hurt.

The parlour glass was only cool. I asked whether he had put something on the parlour glass. She said no, he had put something in front of it.

What stops heat is not glass. It is still air, held where it cannot move. That is why a down quilt is warm and why wool is warm, and a storm window is really a pocket of still air held between two panes.

Every bubble in a sheet of bubble wrap is exactly that on a small scale. You have made a storm window out of packing material. What we go through: Why a storm window works, and why so many old houses still have the hooks on the frames Why the air must be sealed and still, and why a loose sheet of plastic does far less Which size of bubble to use, and where to get it for nothing Putting it up with nothing but a spray bottle of water, bubbles to the glass Why you cut to the pane and not the frame Taking it down in spring with no marks, and numbering the pieces for next year Where it does the most, where it does little, and where not to put it at all Why the cellar window beside your pipes may be the best one in the house Heavy curtains, and why old houses had them and new ones do not A caution for sealed double glazing and coated glass The plain limits: you lose your view.

It will not stop a draught, and on many old windows the draught round the frame is the bigger loss. It is not a mold cure, whatever anybody says. And it is a real saving but not a miracle on the bill.

There is no scheme in any of this. There are good men who make a fair living fitting new windows and for some houses that is the right answer. It is only that nobody makes a living telling you a roll of packing wrap and a spray bottle will do half the job on an old pane.

Tonight, go round your house after dark with the heat on and put your hand on the glass of every window for the count of ten. You will know without being told which ones to do first. Tell me in the comments whether your house still has the hooks on the outside of the window frames where the storm sashes used to hang.

And if you have told me your county before, tell me instead how cold it gets where you are in January. Next time we go after the other half of it, because the rest of the cold is coming round the frame and round the doors and up through the floor, and a lit candle carried slowly round the edges of your rooms will show you every bit of it.

I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #BubbleWrap #WindowInsulation #WinterTips #SaveEnergy #HeatingBill #OldHouse #StormWindows #Frugal #OldWays #Homesteading #SelfReliance #DIY #HouseholdTips #WoodStove