Here's what you missed at the Weatherization Program

On Tuesday night, the Family Center hosted an event for families to come into the Kingsley Center and learn how to weatherize their homes for the winter. By now you can probably guess what weatherization means, it is the process of protecting your home by securing the heat within and preventing any kind of cold air from seeping in from the outside. There are several ways to weatherize your home, during this program Carnegie Mellon students taught families a few effective yet easy ways to do so.

The Carnegie Mellon students running the program are apart of the Freedom by Design organization, which is a branch of AIAS (American Institute of Architecture Students), over at the university. They put together 20 weatherization kits to give away at the event and teach families how to use everything inside. Items inside the kit including vinyl foam self-stick weather seal, plastic window covers, tape measure, door sweeps and much more. Pretty much everything you could possibly need to keep the heat in and the cold out.

Proper weatherization is not only important for maintaining a comfortable temperature within your house, it will also help reduce your gas or electric bill depending on your source of heat. If cold air is getting into one's house, they will typically turn up the heat to combat the cold. Turning up the heat will also raise the price of that bill at the end of the month. However, if you can keep the cold air out, then you will no longer need to keep turning up the heat. Hence why proper weatherization is so important. In the video below, they were going over how you can attach a sheet of plastic to a window frame before using a hair dryer to remove the wrinkles and bubbles in order for the weatherization process to be effective.

Gabrielle Benson (back middle) is in her 3rd year at Carnegie Mellon as an architecture major and was also the one leading this program for AIAS. According to Benson, their "focus is on serving the community, teaching different architectural design methods," in order to benefit people's well-being.

Thank you AIAS and the students over at Carnegie Mellon that came over to the Kingsley Center to teach families about the importance of weatherization!