It seems odd to be thinking about next winter’s heating already, but a lot of us are. While the pre-buy contracts for heating oil last winter were for about $2.25 per gallon, it looks like the price this coming winter will be double that, and local companies aren’t even offering pre-buys. So you could be paying even more come January or February. Filling a 275-gallon oil tank today costs over a thousand dollars. It’s scary.

Ten years ago, an average family in New England was spending about four percent of the household budget on energy; today it’s more like 20%. For lower-income homeowners and renters, that percentage can be far higher. And a lot of residents in the area are not going to be able to afford to heat their homes. This has a lot of us very concerned; the Dummerston Energy Committee (Vermont) has been focusing intensively on these concerns over the past couple months.

What can we do about it? How can we contain these rising costs of energy—not only for heating our homes, but also for powering our electric appliances and driving to work?

Well, there’s a lot that can be done. In this weekly column, I’ll share strategies for buttoning up your homes, choosing more efficient lights and appliances, and using less gasoline to get around. Each week I’ll pick a specific topic, provide some background, then offer practical solutions to save energy and money. Most weeks, I’ll focus on low-cost measures that are easy to implement, but I’ll also address bigger, more involved projects that offer significantly greater savings potential.

We would be in a lot better shape today, had our policy makers heeded those calls for better energy planning 20 or 30 years ago—maintaining President Carter’s leadership on conservation and renewables in the mid-1970s, for example. But instead of looking back at the missed opportunities, we need to look ahead as we deal with the prospect of $5 per gallon heating oil, even higher propane prices, $50 fill-ups at the gas station, and likely increases in electricity prices in the years ahead. What can we do about it?

While this column will focus each week on a specific strategy for containing our energy costs, I’ll start out this week with a top-10 list. Since heating costs are what’s on the mind of many of us, I’ll provide a list of ten things that you can do this summer to reduce your heating costs. This is by no means a comprehensive list. It’s a sampling of the opportunities that are out there for saving energy. I’ll leave the details of these measures to future columns—so stay tuned.

1. 1. Get an energy audit of your house. If you’re a renter and pay for fuel, ask your landlord to have an energy audit done. An energy audit will identify where energy is being wasted and provide advice on what to do about it.

2. 2. Weatherize your house. Dealing with air leakage is usually the easiest way to reduce heating costs—and improve comfort.
3. 3. Install a programmable thermostat (or thermostats) that will allow you to set back temperatures in your house at night.
4. 4. Have your furnace or boiler tuned up. At the same time, ask if the nozzle can be downsized to improve energy performance.
5. 5. Install storm windows or replace your windows with high-performance models. If you can’t afford either of these options, install a plastic layer on the interior to reduce heat loss.
6. 6. Add more attic insulation. If you have an unheated attic, adding additional insulation is relatively cheap and almost always cost-effective. Cellulose is usually the best option.
7. 7. Deal with moisture problems. In tighter houses, there is risk that moisture can accumulate. If you have a wet basement, get it fixed with proper drainage. Install and use (quiet) bathroom fans to ventilate moisture from showering, and use your kitchen range fan when cooking.
8. 8. Close off parts of your house that aren’t actively used. With forced-air heating, hot-air registers can be closed to these spaces; with baseboard hot water, special valves and piping can be installed to bypass baseboard convectors.
9. 9. Replace your showerhead(s) to reduce hot water use. While this isn’t about space heating, if you heat your water with a tankless coil or indirect water heater (operating off the gas- or oil-fired boiler), cutting your hot water use will reduce your fuel use significantly.
10. 10. If you heat with wood, get it stacked under cover as soon as possible so that it will be adequately seasoned to burn with optimal efficiency and minimal pollution.