[topcat]

Wish our electric was that cheap!

Okay, so some of you have me feeling like a wimp. We heat to 65F days maybe and 68-70 in the evenings, and turn back down to 66 at night. Usually fire up the woodburner in the evenings and that puts us around 72 with fan trying to move hot air upstairs.

Question to you more cold type folks.
Are your lower temps due to:
* economics (save money, poor insulation)
* ethics (don't want to waste fuel)
* age (youngsters can tolerate the cold better)?

[EnergyHog]

We keep our thermostat at 61F day and night. That way we can afford to drink good beer.

[IslandCrow]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('topcat', '
')Question to you more cold type folks.
Are your lower temps due to:
*
* age (youngsters can tolerate the cold better)?

[NeoPeasant]

Has anyone thought about the mechanics of draining your indoor plumbing system in case you find yourself in a future winter without the means to maintain your indoor temperature above freezing?

[smallpoxgirl]

Your poll is ummm...faulty. 55 is a heat wave at my house. I'm happy if the dog's water dish doesn't ice over.

[davep]

Since I got the wood stove a couple of weeks ago, the thermostat is off, except at night. Then I heat the radiators of the bedrooms to 17-18 (~64F).

I heat the bathroom in the morning by having a shower. There's no need to use the radiator.

During the day/evening, I have a fan in the kitchen on the work surface, pumping the high hot air round the house. I only have the doors open to rooms I'm using. It works!

What surprised me is that my wife accepts it. She has always had the thermostat up at 22-23 (~73F) throughout the whole house, but last month's natural gas bill has changed her perceptions (along with the drip-drip of my dire warnings).

[topcat]

NeoPeasant wrote:$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'H')as anyone thought about the mechanics of draining your indoor plumbing system in case you find yourself in a future winter without the means to maintain your indoor temperature above freezing?

[rabbit_hop]

An inspiring series of posts!

We've been lucky in southern Scotland this "winter", with daytime temperatures outside around 5-10C (the 40s F). Setting the heating thermostat at 15C (59F) and running it for 1/2 hour in the morning, an hour in the evening, has proved perfectly adequate. Thermal T-shirts and double-knit jumpers were a good investment! Bedroom temp drops overnight to about 12 (54), kitchen can drop to about 8 (46) on some nights. No risk of anything freezing (yet) - it just hasn't been cold enough.

However, I have to go to 'manual override' and turn things up when visitors call ... once they get their coats off, they're usually dressed in flimsy T-shirts or light jerseys (in January) and wonder why my place is so cold.

[dooberheim]

I have very few visitors in the winter - I keep it routinery at 50 - going up to 55 or so if it is very cold outside, even before I got the woodstove.

With the stove the house is between 55-63 even if I don't keep it fed. If I feed it well I can get it up to 70 or so. Still don't get a lot of visitors...

DK

[frankthetank]

An old lady i know (in her 70's) said its a good way to keep company away, and thats just what i like. It really isn't that bad if you can get your hands on a nice hot shower now and then and eat some hot food. Sleeping is the best part of a cold part, except you don't want to get out of bed!

Since we have a well/holding tank/well pump, its very easy to drain the water. I can just go down to the basement and shut the pump off and drain the excess out of the lowest outlet.

This weekend should see temps dip close to -20F, so it'll still be a good 70F warmer inside!

[Ludi]

I don't have a thermostat - we heat the house with wood, mostly.


So, low 50s, I guess, is usually about as low as it gets in the house.

[drew]

1889 double brick farm house. I don't even know if the walls have insulation although the attic has a few feet. We have lots of blankets and use them! Our thermostat is old and not too accurate so I go by a portable hydrometer/thermometer I move from room as need be. Often I find it is down to 64 or so. That's cool.

Years ago I rented a place which had electric heat. I kept it in the fifties one winter. Ouch..

Drew

[HamRadioRocks]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('topcat', 'W')ish our electric was that cheap!

Okay, so some of you have me feeling like a wimp. We heat to 65F days maybe and 68-70 in the evenings, and turn back down to 66 at night. Usually fire up the woodburner in the evenings and that puts us around 72 with fan trying to move hot air upstairs.

Question to you more cold type folks.
Are your lower temps due to:
* economics (save money, poor insulation)
* ethics (don't want to waste fuel)
* age (youngsters can tolerate the cold better)?

[TreebeardsUncle]

Hi. Didn't use wood either, but did get some heating and cooling from neighbors. Can tolerate it down into the 50s and up to around 100 F. I don't like it over 110 F though. Got a little flushed and used a damp wash cloth and started thinking about turning on the air conditioner when we had that hot humid spell (with highs up in the 105 - 112 F range and somewhat humid) with a tropical continental air mass coming in last summer in northern Ca. Haven't felt it below 55 F or so inside so don't know if I would heat or not at that point. Am ok with it in the 40's outside. 30's and damp are frigid and penetrating and not particularly healthy. 20's and dry doesn't feel so much worse overall but are harder on the breathing and can give one a bit of a headache. Have found wearing gloves, a hat, and good boots are generally more important than having a heavy jacket.
Am 35 now. Like to cut costs and don't believe in profligance. Prefer to save the money that most people would waste on frippery and weakening indulgences, and invest it in stocks with the long-term (50-year-plus) goal of being mildly influential.

g

[pea-jay]

Two observations:

1-Some of you are real hard core cold lovers (or tolerators).
2-Our spouses (more female than male) limit how low we take the temperature down with.

Right now I run the gas wall unit during evening hours only. Holds the temp near 68. At night, the unit is switched completely off. Temp falls to 55-60. I sometimes run one or two electric space heaters in each of our bedrooms to keep the room temp at 60-64 (the controls arent too precise). I'll blow 1-3KWh (up to 30 cents) a night, a figure I can live with.

On the other hand, the place I used to live in Chicago seldom sank below 80 in the winter. Only used one radiator sometimes, the rest of the apartment was heated due to the location above the boiler room. Sometimes I would open a window to keep from overheating. Terrible I know.

[jlpicard2]

66F during the day, 63F at night. I have a wife and kids, and get enough comments about the current temps without pushing it any lower. I'm sure nat gas doubling or tripling will force more degrees off of those numbers. Fortunately, my wife and daughter don't get cold easily. I do get cold, but I wear a fleece jacket and knit beanie inside when I am cold, and I always wear slippers. 25+ year old high efficiency nat gas furnace. The walls needed replaced when we bought the house, so we added insulation over most accessible walls and I added some to a few empty or poorly insulated areas in the attic. I do need to plug holes in ductwork still, and add some insulation to basement. Late 60s house which had no insulation in walls, and originally tiny amount in ceiling. Previous owners added more to most of ceiling. Still no insulation behind kitchen cabinets, or near near sliding glass door or in my bedroom closet. Keeping cabinet doors closed is important on cold days, and my dishes are refrigerated.

[Laughs_Last]

I’ve got a programmable thermostat that keeps the house 48 to 55 F on weekdays, up to 58 on weekends, because I am frugal. I might keep it warmer if the insulation was better. We wear jackets and slippers when in the house. For wife accommodation, we have a small south-facing living room with an electric heater that keeps it near 68, with the door shut and a towel placed at the bottom of the door to stop drafts. All the pets are kept in there, along with all computers, television, and most of our use of lighting. For the bathroom, I installed a heat lamp on a timer. I set it for the length of shower I think I should take, and if the light goes out, I know I’ve been in too long. In the bedroom we use and electric blanket with several more blankets on top of that. It’s much cheaper than space heating.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('snax', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('HamRadioRocks', '.') . . As you might have guessed, I don't have a wife. Well, if I had a wife, I'd offer her an alternative way to warm up, especially if we wanted to conceive a baby. (I'm surprised men never offer to warm up their wives in this manner.)

[HamRadioRocks]

I'm surprised I don't see this suggested as a conservation method. As I mentioned before, I have been gradually lowering the thermostat at home. In the first half of October, I set the thermostat to 67 degrees. Since then, I've been gradually lowering the thermostat as I became used to lower temperatures. I had the thermostat down to 62 degrees by the end of November and now have the thermostat down to 59 degrees. (In late October and November, I was lowering the thermostat by about a degree a week. You can see that the rate of change has greatly slowed since.)

A program of gradually lowering the thermostat instead of lowering it several degrees at once softens the shock. I could have saved even more energy if I had kept the thermostat at 59 degrees all along, but on those first cold mornings, an indoor temperature of even 67 degrees felt cryogenic. However, I used considerably less heating back in October and November than I do now simply because outside temperatures were much warmer then.

I'm surprised that the conservation experts don't promote the idea of gradually lowering the thermostat during the heating season. Somebody who started the heating season with the thermostat at 73 degrees and who has since lowered the thermostat by the same 8 degrees I have would now have the thermostat down to a more reasonable 65 degrees.

That said, I don't think I'll be lowering the thermostat any more this winter. The process will go into reverse towards March, April, and May as the weather turns warmer, and I start losing my frost-proof qualities. However, my energy use from heating will be much less simply because outside temperatures will be much warmer.

[frankthetank]

It was 15F out here today and i took an hour walk. Its weird how acclimatized a person can get.

I still think cost will dictate how warm/cold people keep their homes...

[Windmills]

Our heater kicked the bucket going into the fall. We have't had heat for the entire winter. There have been times when we could see our breath, but I don't think the temperature ever dropped much below 40 degrees F.

Most of the time, it's not that big a deal. We threw on a few more blankets at night and wore a few extra layers of clothing around the house during waking hours. We got a small space heater just for the bathroom to use in the morning for a few minutes when getting ready for work and at night when taking showers.

It hasn't been much of an issue being without heat. If it was any colder, it'd just be like any of the cold weather camping trips I've been on. Just have good clothing and a good sleeping bag.

The summer heat is another story...I've been wondering if I'll eventually need to burrow an underground sleeping chamber in order to get a decent night's sleep in the summer. I wonder how workable that is...I know there are some caves around here that stay about 70 F all year 'round.