Right now a lot of people are worried about high home energy bills, including the costs of air conditioning, heating and electricity.

The good news is that there are a lot of easy, inexpensive projects you can do to bring your energy bills down immediately. But if you’re willing to invest a little more time and money, you can save even more, and one home improvement project that can make a big difference in your energy bills is adding insulation.

Yesterday, I was trying to find an answer to a specific question about insulation — how would you add insulation to a cement block wall? — when I ran across this extremely helpful fact sheet from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

I highly recommend checking it out. This fact sheet is a really good general introduction to the topic, but it also helps answer a lot of specific questions about when and how to add insulation. For example, it did include tips for installing insulation on masonry walls, which is what I was initially looking for. It also had a good suggestion about when to insulate your attic — wait until you’ve sealed other air leaks in your home, because once you’ve insulated the attic these drafts don’t go away, but they’re harder to find and fix.

For even more information on insulation, check out this Mother Earth News article All About Insulation. It’s got quite a bit of information about different types of insulation, including some interesting natural options.

It's that time of year again. Temperatures are dropping, and household debates around the thermostat are heating up. Keeping your living space comfortably warm without wasting energy — and money — can be a tough balance to strike, especially since some of us like it warmer than others. But no matter how different our ideas of 'room temperature' might be, there are a surprising number of things we can all agree on. Here are a few talking points that can help peacefully resolve home heating arguments.

Does cranking up the heat warm up the house faster? Nope, not according to the Energy Star program. It's better to just set the thermostat to the level you'd like it to reach. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) suggests no higher than 72 degrees for when people are home.

If you turn down the heat, don't you use a lot of energy warming up the house again? No. The DOE says you use much more energy by leaving the heat turned up all day while you're gone. In fact, it only takes a few minutes to warm your house once you turn the heat back up and you burn surprisingly little energy in doing so.

How low can you safely turn down the heat? Even if there's no one home, you should leave the heat up high enough at all times that you're not in danger of the pipes freezing. This DOE page recommends keeping the temperature above 50 degrees.

  How much money does turning down the heat really save? It depends on a lot of factors, but a rule of thumb suggested by both the Alliance to Save Energy and the DOE is that for each degree you turn down the thermostat, you can save about 3 percent on your heating bill.

Do we have to keep it so cold in here!?! If you're keeping your house colder than you'd like because it saves energy, make sure you've considered all the options. It's not as hard as you might think to save energy, save money and make your home more comfortable all at the same time. Here are a couple of ideas:

• Install a programmable thermostat — or adjust the settings if you already have one — so that the temperature kicks on about 15 minutes before you typically arrive home each day. That way you save a lot of energy but don't have to come home to a cold house. You can do the same thing at night.
• Turn down the thermostat at night, but stay warm by piling on the blankets and using an electric mattress pad. Gary Reysa calculated significant savings for this practice on his Build it Solar site.
• Step away from the thermostat! Turning down the heat is probably the most obvious way to save on your heating bills, but there are dozens of others, and many of them will make your home more comfortable. Here is a good place to get started, and here are a few other places to look for ideas.

Do you know of other good resources to learn more about saving energy at home? You can post them in the comments section below.