I have a series of home maintenance plans every autumn as the weather starts to drop and transition into winter.
First of all, I like to use plastic film to insulate my leaky windows from cold drafts.
It’s cheap, looks like thick plastic wrap, and it is easy to install and remove. Some people might scoff if they haven’t tried window film, but it genuinely makes a huge difference in regions as cold as mine. I also like to get a cord or two of wood chopped ahead of the first snowfall. Luckily, I have ample room for chopped wood in my barn where I keep my horses, tools, and building materials. I have a wood stove in my living room that is an amazing source of radiant heat in the extreme winter weather here. But, despite how great my wood stove is, I still supplement it with my electric furnace. As many people know, an electric furnace can have a funky odor when it’s first used again after being shut down for six or seven months. It’s important to let the furnace run for a day or two just to burn off the dust and microbial growth that settled on the heat exchanger while it was turned off. Thankfully, my furnace only needs a day of burn off before the odor finally goes away. My parents have an older furnace and theirs takes two to three times as long to burn off the funky odors from being shut off for so long. It’s a frustrating reality to deal with if you rely on indoor heat daily through the cold season, but at least in my case, it’s only a temporary inconvenience. Compared to all of the wood chopping and weatherproofing I do around the house, putting the furnace through a burn off cycle is probably the easiest thing of all.