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Energy saving tip number 5
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Insulate...

Make sure the exterior walls of your home and business are well insulated. A well-insulated home can stay at a comfortable temperature without using a furnace or heater even when it gets down to 0C-5C or lower outside. Just your body heat and the waste heat from appliances is enough to keep it cozy inside. If your home can’t do this, here’s what to do…

Use a hand-held infrared thermometer to check the temperature of all of areas on the exterior walls of your home, looking for excess heat. (It’s best to do this in the early morning, before the sun heats up the exterior.) Usually, upstairs and the attic/roof are where heat leaks most because those are the warmest parts inside the home. If you use a warm room, that will naturally show more heat, also. Once you find out where the trouble spots are, you can address those by adding insulation to those areas. If all of the walls are even and you still lose too much heat, then your home may not be properly insulated at all and you’ll need to add insulation throughout all of the walls and attic/roof.

Insulation is rated with an R-value, the higher the number the better the insulation is per cm thickness. It’s usually better to use better or more insulation in the attic and roof, because that’s usually where it is warmest.

You can get creative with insulation – it doesn’t have to be regular building material. You can use bails of straw stacked against the outside walls, or you can shovel or gently plow fluffy snow against the exterior in the winter. Here’s link to a list of various insulation material. Remember it’s not just the R-value, it’s the thickness, too. So it may make sense to use a lower R-value material if it is cheaper and you are able to use a lot of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-value_(insulation)#Example_values

(Image https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1024_Pyrometer-8445.jpg, CC-BY-SA-3.0)