How do I stay warm this winter without a huge bill?

Two answers, because the cold you walk through and the cold you live in are different problems. Dress in layers of anything but cotton; heat the house lower, never off.

On your body: layers, and no cotton. What actually keeps you warm outside starts by clearing the thing almost everybody has been told: you do not lose most of your body heat through your head. The figure comes from studying people in Arctic survival suits with only their heads exposed, so it is a fact about the suit. A hat is still cheap, but if you are choosing between a hat and a coat, the coat wins. What keeps you warm is several thin layers of anything except cotton, loose enough that your blood can move, with something windproof outside. Cotton holds your sweat and melted snow and stays wet, and wet fabric pulls heat out faster than bare skin; jeans, most cheap socks and most T-shirts under a coat are cotton. Wool or synthetic for the layer touching you and for socks. The counterintuitive one: tight clothing makes you colder, because squeezed hands and feet get less blood, so the answer to cold feet is often thinner socks or a bigger boot, not another sock. Do not let yourself sweat; take a layer off before you are damp. Standing on concrete pulls heat out by contact, and a scrap of cardboard or foam underfoot was one outdoor worker’s single biggest change. The page’s safety line: skin gone white or greyish and hard or numb is frostbite; get indoors, warm it with warm, not hot, water or body heat, never a heating pad, stove or rubbing, and have it looked at afterwards.

In the house: down, never off. Program the thermostat down, never off is two people’s independent rule. The hours you are at work and asleep are a third to a half of the week; heat them a few degrees less on a schedule and the bill notices while you mostly do not. The second half is the one that costs people: never off. Waiting for freezing weather to touch the heat is how pipes burst, and a burst pipe erases years of thermostat savings in one afternoon; homes kept too cold also grow mould. Leaving for the winter? is the same lesson for an empty house. Someone planning to shut everything off for five months and save about eleven hundred dollars ended up draining the pipes, unplugging everything and holding the heat around fifty degrees, because the house they wanted to come home to was worth more than the saving. The gas question there resolves once you see two houses talking: fully drained and unheated, turn the gas off at the line; held at fifty by a gas furnace, the gas stays on.

Wood, only if the wood is nearly free. Wood heat is cheap only if you burn it right is blunt: the people who save real money cut fallen wood on their own land or take dead trees off public land on a cheap permit; buy it cut, split and delivered and most of the saving is gone, before the saw, splitter, stove and chimney. Its safety lines matter more than its economics: never burn treated, painted or glued wood, pressure-treated lumber, old decking, plywood, chipboard, because burned they give off real poisons; burn only wood dried six months to a year, and sweep the chimney yearly, because wet wood and a dirty flue build the tarry creosote that starts chimney fires; a closed stove rather than an open fireplace, which sends most of its heat up the chimney; the woodpile a few feet from the house, off the ground and covered; and a smoke alarm and a carbon-monoxide alarm wherever you burn. The page carries the argument about whether a modern stove burns clean, three accounts to three, and its decider is your topography, the wind and how near your neighbours are.

Who this is not for. The layering page says it: if the problem is not a walk but a flat that will not get warm, layers do not reach it, and its one warning for that reader is open flame, because candles and portable stoves used for warmth are how house fires start. Its advice for that evening is to find out what assistance exists where you live; LIHEAP, the national programme that helps lower-income households with heating, cooling and sometimes past-due energy bills, is in the Resource Bank and cited below. The wood page names who it is not for: renters, anyone with asthma or a tree or smoke allergy, a tightly sealed modern home, and anyone who cannot safely do heavy, repetitive lifting.