Here at Dawson’s Fuels, we work hard to keep you warm through the winter, with a great range of solid fuels delivered direct to your door. But there’s lots of ways that you can help yourself too, cutting your fuel bills and keeping your home warmer.

Try our top ten tips and see how much you can save. They’re all really small, simple changes, but add them together and they can make a big difference to how warm your home feels when the cold starts to bite.

1. Layer up – you’ll warm up much quicker by pulling on a jumper than putting on the heating. Your body makes heat all the time and extra layers mean you get to keep much more of it to yourself.
2. DIY draught proofing – you don’t need to spend a lot to stop the heat leaking from your home. Simple draught proofing strips are easy to fit around doors and windows, and you can make a draught excluder for the bottom of your door with an old pair of tights or a swimming pool noodle. Don’t forget your front door too; keyholes, letterboxes and cat flaps all leak heat if you don’t cover them up.
3. Draw your curtains – even modern double glazed windows still leak heat so make sure you close your curtains as soon as the sun goes down. Changing light summer curtains for lined winter ones will cut heat lost by as much as 25%.
4. Cap your chimney – at Dawson’s we love an open fire, but if you’re not using your chimney, you could be losing loads of heat. Get unused chimneys capped or get a chimney balloon to stop heat escaping.
5. Move your furniture – move armchairs and sofas away from radiators so they don’t block heat. You should also move your bed away from the wall a little to create an air barrier to avoid heat loss via conduction.
6. Pimp your radiator – adding a few extras to your radiator will give you lots of extra heat. Placing foil, or specialist radiator reflectors, behind them stops you wasting money heating the walls, while a shelf above stops the heat from rising up to the ceiling or out of the windows.
7. Leave the doors open – not the door to the cold hall, obviously, but the door to the warm kitchen, or the hot bathroom after your bath. If you’ve cooked using your oven, leave the door open afterwards to enjoy the heat of the room (but keep an eye on the kids!).
8. Invest in a ceiling fan – these are not just for keeping you cool in the summer, but on the lowest setting, they can also keep you warm in the winter by re-circulating the warm air that has risen in the room.
9. Programme your heating – that way it will always be warm when you come home, and you’ll never leave it on all night by mistake. Check out smartphone apps, such as Hive, which give you even greater control of your thermostat.
10. Be more social – spending more time at the homes of friends and family, or even at the cinema or the pub, means you have to heat your own home less. Equally, having friends and family round to yours means more bodies to warm your home.

As well as taking steps to keep your own home warmer, spare a thought for elderly friends and neighbours when things turn really cold. Just an hour or so helping them to apply the tips above can make a huge difference to their warmth and comfort, and it could even save their life.