Use Leaves to Insulate Your Home

After you have finished raking up the leaves on your lawn in the fall, you have an organic material that can be used as a home insulation material. In addition to saving money over the winter on you heating costs, you will be able to reuse the leaves in the spring as mulch for your garden.

Gather Your Leaves

Wait for a warmer and dryer autumn day to gather your leaves. This will help prevent mold from growing on the leaves while it is being used as insulation. Because some leaves still may be damp or wet, you will need to lay them out in the garage or another place where they will be protected from moisture so that they can fully dry out.

You can collect your leaves by raking them, picking them up or using a bagging mower. It is important to collect all the leaves as you can so that you will have enough material to use for insulation.

Bag Up the Leaves

After the leaves have fully dried, you will want to bag them in plastic bags. It is important to not use baby bags as they could begin to rot or decompose. Make sure to remove all small rocks, branches or twigs from your leaves as you bag them to make sure that you do not poke holes in the bags. Make sure that you tie up the bags very tightly with string or by knitting the plastic. If you are concerned that the leaves may still break through the plastic, double bag them to give them a little extra protection.

External Insulation

Line up the bags around your home, garage and other areas you would like to keep warm over the winter. You may want to check any laws about the appearance of garbage in your front lawn before lining the bags where they would be visible from the street.

Make sure that the bags are touching the walls of your house and that they cover as much area as possible. Stack them up as high as you can for added insulation.

Internal Insulation

For internal insulation, you can place the bags of leaves in the attic or the basement.

Placing the bags in the attic will help prevent warm air from leaving your home through the roof. This process will only work with finished attics. The first thing you should do is set down thick woolen blankets or a tarp on the floor of your attic. Then arrange the bags of leaves, starting from the outside of the house toward the inside of the house. It is better to spread out the bags in this case, rather than stacking them.

If your basement is fully underground, placing leaves as insulation may not help you much, but if there is some portion of the basement above ground, you can lay the bags of leaves on higher shelves around the area of your basement. This will help cool air from entering your basement and your home.

Though raking, drying and bagging your leaves may be a lot of work, it will pay off in a warmer house and cheaper utilities.