Savings tip from inventor Dirk from Obdam: insulation board against your windows

To prevent his house in Obdam from looking uncomfortable and boarded up from the outside, he has covered the visible side of the insulation panels with a cozy wallpaper. “Then we don’t look so antisocial,” says Dirk. He came up with his plan after analyzing the indoor and outdoor temperatures near his windows. In a table he kept track of how quickly it cooled down inside when the temperature outside dropped.

After installing the screens, he noticed that the temperature in his living room dropped much more slowly, even though he turned down the thermostat on his central heating.

Dirk was once a farmer, but has been calling himself an inventor for some time now. “I can just use that title without having to have followed any training,” he says. The results of his efforts, complicated-looking devices, are everywhere in his house and garden. There is also his workshop. A neatly arranged barn with drawings on the wall of inventions he made earlier. That is also the place where he made the insulation boards to size.

Unsociable

The result of his rage for saving is that no more light enters through the windows and that you can no longer look outside from the living room. But Dirk wouldn’t be an inventor if he wasn’t also thinking up a solution for that problem, although he doesn’t mind the window covering itself: “We don’t look outside at night anyway.” He is now working on a system in which he builds a small camera into the insulation panel. This way he can see what is happening in the garden and on the sidewalk via the camera on a screen. How much money his measure will save will become clear after the winter. Dirk expects that he will easily earn back his investment of a few tenners.