It was a whopping 21 degrees outside this morning at 5AM, and apparently getting colder as 2 hours later my thermometer is reading 20.3 degrees!

This is one of those days where the furnace will be working extra hard, and our pellet stove will likely be running full time as well.  This is also one of those days where we will be living in the dark.  Yes, the dark. Well, sort of. 

We have room darkening shades on many of our main living area windows (so we can watch movies during the daytime without a lot of glare from the windows). They not only block the light, but they really help to keep the heat out in the summer, and the heat in over the winter.   

They say the average home can lose up to 30% of it’s heat through windows….we’ve replaced ours with energy efficient windows, but I’m sure there’s still loss. 

But I didn’t realize how much our window shades helped until last night.

A couple of us were sitting in our family room on a bench in front of the window….it was a toasty 70-degrees in there with the pellet stove blaring. We opened the blinds to look outside….and whoosh! I could just FEEL the cold air coming through.  And it wasn’t an initial burst….10-minutes later it still felt cold and drafty on my back.

So this morning I got curious. I put a thermometer on the bench where I was sitting last night, the shades have been down and the temperature about a foot away from the window shade measured 67 degrees.

Then I moved the thermometer to the space between the window and the blinds.  I gave it 10 minutes to adjust and when I went back to look at it, it said that space was 55-degrees!   No wonder I could feel the cold air moving into the room. 

If I open all my blinds today- that means my furnace will be battling 55-degree air seeping from my windows- and we have a lot of windows!

So my window shades will remain down all day- energy savings.   I hope this cold snap doesn’t last TOO long!