How to Prepare Your Home for the Heating Season — Before You Start Thinking About a New Heating System

As the heating season approaches, the first question is often:

• What will be the cheapest way to heat the house this year?

• Wood pellets? Gas? Electricity? A heat pump? Infrared heating?

But before comparing heating technologies, it is worth asking another question:

• How much heat does our home actually need?

Every heating system essentially does the same thing — it replaces the heat that the building loses.

And we are the ones paying for those heat losses.

1. Start with the Building, Not the Heating System

If a house consumes a lot of energy in winter, the heating system itself is not necessarily the problem.

The building may be the real issue.

Heat is continuously lost through:

🟧 ✓ the roof and attic

🟧 ✓ external walls

🟧 ✓ windows and external doors

🟧 ✓ floors and foundations

🟧 ✓ ventilation and uncontrolled air leakage

The greater the heat loss, the more energy the heating system must use to maintain an indoor temperature of, for example, +21 °C.

No heating system can overcome the laws of physics.

2. Check Your Windows and Doors

You do not always need to replace all your windows immediately.

Sometimes the problem is much simpler — worn seals, poorly adjusted fittings, or gaps around windows and doors.

On a cold, windy day, you can often feel these draughts simply by running your hand around the frame.

Pay particular attention to:

🟧 ✓ joints around windows and frames

🟧 ✓ balcony and terrace doors

🟧 ✓ external doors

🟧 ✓ window sill areas

🟧 ✓ points where pipes, cables or other services pass through external walls

A small gap may not seem significant.

But if cold air enters through it 24 hours a day throughout the winter, your heating system has to continuously warm that incoming air.

3. Look Up — Check the Roof and Attic

Warm air rises, which makes proper insulation of the roof and upper floor structure particularly important.

If your attic is accessible, it is worth checking the condition of the insulation before winter.

Is it evenly distributed?

Are there areas where the insulation has settled, shifted or been damaged?

Have any sections been left uninsulated after renovation or maintenance work?

Sometimes this is exactly where significant heat losses can be found — and fixing them may deliver greater savings than replacing the heating equipment itself.

4. Ventilation — Don’t Save Energy at the Expense of Air Quality

A house cannot simply be sealed completely.

Indoor spaces need adequate air exchange.

However, there is an important difference between controlled ventilation and cold air entering uncontrollably through gaps and leaks.

If the building has mechanical ventilation, check that the system is operating correctly and that the filters are in good condition before the heating season begins.

With natural ventilation, ventilation ducts should not be blocked simply to retain more heat.

The goal is not to stop ventilation, but to reduce unnecessary air leakage.

5. Consider How You Actually Use Your Rooms

This brings us back to the subject of the previous article.

Do all rooms really need to be kept at the same temperature?

If your home is 150 m² but you regularly use only 100–120 m², it is worth considering whether every room needs the same heating schedule and temperature at all times.

The same applies to:

🟧 ✓ guest rooms

🟧 ✓ home offices

🟧 ✓ utility rooms

🟧 ✓ rooms on the upper floor

🟧 ✓ spaces used only at certain times of the day

We cannot eliminate all necessary heat loss, but we can avoid heating spaces unnecessarily.

6. Check Your Existing Heating System Before the First Cold Weather

If your heating system requires regular maintenance, do not wait until the first cold week of winter to have it checked.

Depending on the technology, you may need to inspect:

🟧 ✓ the technical condition of the boiler or heat pump

🟧 ✓ filters

🟧 ✓ circulation pumps

🟧 ✓ system pressure

🟧 ✓ radiators and heating circuits

🟧 ✓ thermostats and temperature sensors

🟧 ✓ control schedules

A heating system can be running without operating efficiently.

And this often becomes noticeable only when the first really cold weather arrives.

7. If Possible, Check Your Home with a Thermal Camera

It is not always possible to see exactly where a building is losing heat with the naked eye.

Thermal imaging can help identify areas of increased heat loss — for example, structural joints, areas around windows and doors, or sections with insufficient insulation.

However, thermal imaging provides the most useful results when there is a sufficient temperature difference between indoors and outdoors.

So there is no need to rush out with a thermal camera at the end of summer.

Wait for suitable weather conditions and then inspect the building.

Only Then Consider a New Heating System

Once we understand the building’s heat losses and how the rooms are actually used, we can evaluate different heating technologies much more objectively.

Instead of simply comparing:

• wood pellets with infrared heating,

• gas with a heat pump,

• or a heat pump with infrared heating,

we can ask the right question:

• Which heating system is best suited to this particular building?

The price of energy is only one part of the equation. Other important factors include:

🟧 ✓ required heating capacity

🟧 ✓ initial investment

🟧 ✓ system efficiency

🟧 ✓ room-by-room temperature control

🟧 ✓ maintenance and servicing costs

🟧 ✓ service life

🟧 ✓ total long-term cost

And sometimes the conclusion may be that the existing heating system does not need to be replaced at all.

In other cases, installing a new heating system may be the more economically sensible choice.

First, reduce the amount of heat the building needs. Then decide how to produce it.

In our view, this is the most important principle to keep in mind before the new heating season begins.

No one can predict exactly what the winter will be like or how energy prices will develop.

But we can prepare a building so that it requires less energy to maintain a comfortable indoor temperature.

Only then does it make sense to compare different heating technologies.

Next Article

Infrared Heating — When Is It Really a Good Choice?

In the first four articles, we have looked at energy prices, total heating costs, energy consumption control and building heat loss.