09:21 AM EST on Monday, December 12, 2005

BY TIMOTHY C. BARMANN
Journal Staff Writer

Part 10 of a series.

We asked for tips, and you delivered.

Dozens of readers responded to our Bracing For Winter series with their own advice on how to save energy this heating season.

In this installment, we present suggestions that seemed especially helpful or creative. Some cost little or nothing, while others require a significant investment.

The readers who shared them say they really work. We can't vouch for that, but in some cases, we contacted experts to see if they agreed.

Here's a selection of readers' energy-saving strategies:

STANTON OSE has five entryways to his Bristol house. And during cold, wintry days, the wind would rip through.

His solution was to stuff 7-foot lengths of standard fiberglass insulation between the storm door and the entry door.

"The space between the two [doors] kind of holds it in place," he said. "It just sits there. It's very simple."

He said he used two strips of 15-inch wide insulation, 3 inches thick, for each door.

To make it look better, his wife made a "sock" that slips over the insulation strips to cover them. It's made of inexpensive fabric.

"Just standing next to it you can tell the difference," he said.

TALK ABOUT stocking up. Arthur Nelson, a Rehoboth real-estate developer, buys all the heating oil he'll need for the coming year, all at once.

Journal photo / Bob Thayer

Ana Farias, of Providence, says it's a fact that her cat Leah makes sleeping on a cold night a lot toastier. Dogs don't work as well, she says.

He installed four 330-gallon tanks in his house that together hold 1,320 gallons -- the maximum allowed by Massachusetts regulations. (Rhode Island allows half that amount, according to the State Fire Marshal's office.)

He calls an oil dealer in the summer or fall, or at a time when he thinks oil prices have reached a low point, he said.

All four tanks are connected so that the level falls in all four simultaneously as oil is used.

Nelson has been keeping track of his oil purchases since 1998, and according to his calculations, he's saved $3,800 by buying in bulk.

For example, he said during this past summer, he bought 1,195 gallons at $1.883 a gallon. The average price at the time was $2.231 per gallon. That was a savings of 15.6 percent, or $416.09. (The average price in Rhode Island was $2.419 as of last week.)

Installing four oil tanks requires a significant investment. Nelson said he added two 330-gallon tanks to his home in August 2003 at a cost of $1,970, including installation.

"I have not run into any difficulties with this higher-capacity concept and will continue to think of it as an ideal way to reduce the overall cost of heating," he said in an e-mail message.

The service manager at White Fuel, a large heating-oil dealer in Providence, said he didn't think installing extra tanks was a good idea.

"To recommend that a consumer go out and install four tanks, it's not feasible," said Ron Manish, the service manager. "It doesn't add up," he said. "You won't save that kind of money."

He said the cost for a tank and installation today is about $1,600 to $1,800.

And he said having that much oil in your basement could compound the damage caused by a leaking oil tank or line.

"You could potentially have all that oil dumping into the basement," he said.

John Leo said he has seen too many oil tanks fail in people's basements to recommend the four-tank strategy.

"If you get more oil tanks, it's more problems," said Leo, who is a hazardous-waste engineer for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management. He gets called any time there's an oil spill, and that's pretty frequent these days, he said.

"Every year, more and more go as the age of tanks increases," he said. "I would not want to deal with four 330s when something let go. I hope if they have a spill like that, they don't have natural gas pilot flame in the basement."

ANA FARIAS of Providence recommends getting a cat to sleep with you at night to stay warm. "I don't know why a cat works a lot better than a dog."

Her cat, Leah, can't resist the wool blanket on her bed, she said. "When she gets up and gets on my leg, it is amazing how much heat she generates."

It's no wonder. The normal body temperature for cats is 101 degrees to 102.2, according to thepetcenter.com . Dogs are usually 101 degrees to 102.5 degrees.

More than half of pet owners allow the animals to sleep on their beds, according to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association.

Farias offered an anecdote to back her claim. She said her brother visited recently and he complained that he was cold sleeping in her house. She asked him if he had left the cat on the bed and he said, no, he had kicked her off.

Ana told him about her discovery, and the next few nights, he left the cat on the bed. And he stopped complaining about being cold.

Sharing a bed with a pet isn't for everyone. Some people have allergies to pet fur.

And the animals can cause sleeping problems for some people. A 2001 study by the Mayo Clinic Sleep Disorders Center of 300 people being treated for sleeping problems found that 22 percent of them slept with a pet. More than half of the pet owners said their sleep was disrupted every night. Snoring was reported in 21 percent of dogs and seven percent of cats.

DONNA CLARK of Tiverton discovered that the dryer sheets she's always put in the clothes dryer had built up an invisible film on the dryer's lint filter.

Even though it looked clean, she said put it under the faucet and water pooled inside the filter.

She washed it with a toothbrush, soap and water, and now she says the drying time has been cut in half.

Before her discovery, Clark said, she thought the dryer might be broken.

"I was thinking about getting a new dryer," she said. Her fix was far less expensive.

"If I hadn't seen it puddle I wouldn't have believed it myself."

Timothy C. Barmann covers energy issues, utilities and technology. He can be reached at tbarmann@projo.com