Before the cold arrives
Winter home checklist
One evening in late autumn, walking the house with a notebook, saves most of January's emergencies. Here is the walk, in the order that pays back fastest.
One evening, room by room
- Every radiator and heater: bleeds clean, no cold patches, nothing leaning against them.
- Windows and doors: close every one properly and listen. Where you hear the street, you are heating the street.
- Attic hatch: shuts tight and has insulation sitting on top of it, not underneath.
- Boiler or heat pump: serviced before the first cold snap, not during it. Bookings get scarce in November.
- Lamps and clocks: change the batteries when the clocks change, smoke and CO alarms included.
Heating without surprises
Heating is where winter goes wrong in the expensive ways. Portable heaters need a metre of clear space around them, clothes drying on them is how house fires start, and anything that burns fuel needs its chimney or flue swept within the year. Fixed systems deserve a professional: a certified installer wiring panels or a serviced boiler is cheaper than one emergency callout.
Before the heating season starts, run the full home heating safety checklist once. It takes about twenty minutes, it covers alarms, heaters and flues room by room, and it is written for ordinary houses rather than for engineers.
Drafts and small fixes
Most homes lose more heat through gaps than through walls. Self adhesive draft strips on doors and opening windows cost a few euro and an afternoon. Heavier curtains, hung close to the wall and just below the sill, keep rooms noticeably warmer at night. Letterbox flaps and keyholes on exposed doors are worth a cover each. None of this is glamorous, and all of it shows on the first bill.
If the house will be empty
A frozen pipe bursts in seconds and drains for hours. Before any trip away in a cold spell, leave the heating on low rather than off, know where the stopcock is and check that someone else in the house knows too, and shut off the water supply to outdoor taps after draining them. Ask a neighbour to collect post and to have your number, not for the post, but because a burst pipe is silent until it is very much not.
Ladders, bins and loose items in the garden deserve five minutes as well. Winter storms move whatever is not tied down, and a flying bin lid is a window claim waiting to happen. Torch, batteries and a bottle of water in the same drawer complete the kit, because the single most likely household emergency in January is a power cut, not a burst.
What can wait and what cannot
| Do now | Can wait until spring |
|---|---|
| Boiler service, chimney sweep, alarm batteries | Repainting window frames |
| Draft strips on the worst two doors | Replacing a working but ugly radiator |
| Bleeding radiators, attic hatch seal | Garden and exterior cosmetics |
The rule underneath the table: anything that stops heat arriving, or lets fumes stay indoors, is a now problem. Everything else is a list for March, when the trades have time again and you can think straight without your coat on indoors.