Should you keep doors open or closed when the heating is on?

Open… or closed? (Picture: Getty)

Many will be looking at ways to keep warm as winter looms, without adding to their super-high energy bills.

One thing to do is try to eliminate draughts from your home, so you know when you stick on your central heating, the heat won’t escape. You may even need to put it on a bit less.

That begs the question: what about your internal doors?

If you’re heating the living room on a frosty winter’s eve, should you shut the door to keep the heat in? Or if you rarely use your spare room, should that door be kept closed?

Is it ever a good idea to keep doors open – to circulate the heating around your home?

Let’s see what the experts say.

When the heating is on, should you keep doors open or closed?

Does keeping them closed keep the heat in? (Picture: Getty)

According to The Energy Saving Trust, you should keep the door closed on rooms you aren’t heating or using.

The charity explains: ‘Keep inside doors closed if they lead to an unheated room, to prevent cold air mixing with warmed air and flowing around the house.’

But what about the room you are using – such as the bedroom or living room?

Jess Steele, a heating technology expert for designer radiator specialists Best Heating, tells metro.co.uk it’s a ‘simple error’ to heat the whole house every day – rather than targeting just one room.

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She advises: ‘Instead, you should only heat the room you are in and close doors. By having doors open, heat is lost more quickly and will also warm up an unused space, which adds needless money to energy bills.

‘Doing this will make your boiler work more efficiently, allowing the room you are in to warm up faster and saving as much as £115 [per year] if your heating is used daily.

‘However, don’t turn off any radiators in the room the thermostat is in or else it will affect the temperature of the rest of your home.’

Sounds simple enough – but Jess also notes that if you do have an unheated room you’ve closed the door on, you shouldn’t leave it unheated forever, in order to avoid any unwanted issues.

As Jess explains: ‘Every so often (around two to three weeks), radiators should be turned on in unused spaces for a short spell of time to prevent any internal problems around the home.

‘If not, this may cause issues such as frozen pipes as well as mould and damp, which can be caused by moisture in the air having nowhere to go and settling on colder surfaces.

‘A good way to prevent this is to use thermostatic radiator valves to control the heating in different rooms. This allows a reasonably lower temperature to be set in other rooms and a higher one in the room you are using.’

If you’re worried about heat escaping your room or house, it’s also worth checking you’ve draught-proofed your doors – which can be done with fairly inexpensive items.

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Keen to keep the heat? Here’s what to know.