To never ever put the heating on?

[Awayawaywe]

In the last 2 years we have had the heating on a maximum of 10 days. We use hot water bottles at night and blankets and copius amounts of tea to keep warm. This means our electricity bill is the same in the summer as it is in winter (although we do bathe more in winter as in summer we mostly just have a wash)
We have 3dc all five and under and now when I visit other peoples houses I am sweltering! I end up in a vest sweating my head off!
Are we the only ones?!!!!

Ps this is saving us about £30 a month in the winter months.

Where does the op say it's for environmental reasons?

Firstly, in her first two posts she talks only about the money saving aspect and I suspect this is what it's actually about.

Secondly, if it is about environmental reasons well, she's had 3 kids, so that ship has well and truly sailed!!

I feel sorry for any visitors and suspect they will get fewer and fewer because no one likes to be cold.

I mostly have the heating on to dry washing. I live in a top flat. Me and my son just like it cool and we both go red in heated buildings. £30 a month is a fortune to me.

"This is true but most had coal fires or similar so that at least one room would be warm. Also the chimney would heat the rooms above."
The op hasnt said she has no other source of heat. I am presuming she does have a fire.

Why are people going on about central heating being a recent thing? People used fires and heaters! I grew up in a house with no central heating, we had a large gas fire in the living room and electric and oil heaters upstairs. OP said she relies on tea, blankets and water bottles, therefore it is not the same, her house will be freezing.

Your kids do need to wash though, they’ll get teased. I would rather go without a daily wash than make my teen son wash less, oldies do t smell as much.

Lucky you. It didnt appear on our estate until at least 1980s,

You know, 1980 is still 40 years ago!

Our heating only comes on twice a day for an hour in the Winter, am currently sitting in front of a gas fire.

"Nobody had central heating 40 years ago..

We got it in 1968 and it was such a relief. OP you are so BU. And I can't understand how there isn't damp and mould everywhere.

Load of balls OP unless you are virtue signalling your thriftiness then crack on as no one cares.

Just noticed OP is on a key meter so perhaps does have £ worries but doesn’t want to say so?

"Lucky you. It didnt appear on our estate until at least 1980s,

You know, 1980 is still 40 years ago!"

My lucky you comment was in response to someone who they had it in 1960!!!!! I'm the poster who initially said 40 years ago!!!

If it’s to do with not being able to afford it then that’s obviously really shit. And I’ve got all the sympathy in the world for people in that situation.

I'm also intrigued as you how you dry your washing, presuming you don't have a fire/log burner etc.

I grew up in a house with little heating downstairs and none upstairs, and it was miserable. Doing homework and studying for exams was miserable, and I would sit there in many layers, and fingerless gloves. Remember that there will come at time when your DC are not running about all the time, and will be sitting more.

I rarely use our heating, our house is drafty and cold even with it on. Its a waste of money having the heating fly out under the doors, the skirting boards and out the windows. Having radiators under the windows doesn't seem logical either. My windows are double glazed but cheap and old, council not interested in replacing them.

Lucky you. It didnt appear on our estate until at least 1980s, we didnt get it till 1990.

The 1980's WERE forty years ago. 1990 was thirty years ago - it's not like it was yesterday.

And even if that's the case, there's no need to live like that now. I mean, I remember being so broke we couldn't afford the heating and we ended up living in a freezing cold, mould-infested flat. Why on earth anyone would choose to live like hat is beyond me.

I’m with you op.
Very rarely bother with the heating. Always have log burner on the go in the evenings tho (which I also boil the kettle on, bake potatoes in etc)

And yes I find other people’s houses unbearably hot. Went to an Xmas ‘do’ and the temp actually made me feel ill. Fortunately Im ‘of an age’ so I just said I was having a hot flush and stood outside for a bit!

I do put it on when we have visitors tho...I don’t want to make other people uncomfortable.

As an aside, I am becoming more and more convinced that this over-heated house thing is not helping with the obesity epidemic at all. Slows the metabolism.

We didn't have central heating in the council house I lived in until I was 18. I am 44 now. We did however have a coal, later gas, fire in the front room and a heater in the bathroom. With thick PJs, dressing gowns, hot water bottles and the like I don't remember feeling abnormally cold, although it was an ice-on-the-inside-of-the-windows house. It was not damp or mouldy. So I don't think children brought up in a house without central heating automatically equals abuse.
On the other hand the house I live in no has central heating, and while I don't like a house to be too hot I wouldn't want to be without it!

You are freezing your backsides off for £30 a month and potentially getting damp in the house to boot? Wow!😂

Ice 'ferns' inside the windows were really pretty - I remember them well. I didn't mind a cold bedroom; with hot water bottles it was warm under the covers. When we were children, my mother used to switch on a small electric fire for about 20 minutes or so while we got dressed.

What people have not said so far on this thread was that there were sources of heating in the past as 'extras' from a rather different way of life. The bathroom was heated by the (fearsome) gas geyser that provided hot water; as a child I remember having a bath surrounded by clouds of steam. Meals and extras such as cake or biscuits were cooked at home from scratch, and so kitchens were heated daily by ovens and/or gas rings and by steam from boiling pots and pans. Washing - before automatic machines - was also very steamy; clothes were boiled (!) in a huge copper, or in the big tub of a twin tub. Some houses had an old-fashioned range or a more modern 'ideal' boiler - fuelled by coke - in the the kitchen to heat domestic water. Those radiated a lot of heat but created truly dreadful amounts of dust. Most houses - as previous posters have said - also had at least one open fireplace to burn wood or coal.

All these heat sources were enormously labour intensive, and the work was usually done by women. I'm not saying that we should go back to those days, but they were not totally spartan. (And, like many other posters, I don't really understand what point the OP is trying to make. Perhaps as a result of my childhood, I sometimes find central heating stuffy and I usually have it turned down fairly low, but it is undeniably much, much easier...)

I know this sounds daft, but pets were also heat sources. I think I'm remembering correctly that there's a bit in Sylvia Plath's letters about a hostess offering her guests a choice at bedtime on a cold winter evening - a hot-water bottle or a cat.

Very rarely bother with the heating. Always have log burner on the go in the evenings tho (which I also boil the kettle on, bake potatoes in etc)

So you DO have heating - just in the form of a log burner instead of central heating. Not the same thing as sitting in a freezing cold home at all!

How do you dry laundry? I'd be very worried about both damp and frozen pipes if I were you.

The money it would cost to put either of those things right would be way more than the cost of heat through the winter.

Maybe you rent and it's not your issue though..

I grew up in a house like this. East coast of Scotland, victorian house with no insulation, single glazed sash windows. It was SO, so cold. We got central heating fitted in the early 80s when I was about 11 and had the windows replaced with double glazed at the same time. What a difference! I remember the dashes to the bathroom in the freezing cold at night and seeing your breath as you lay in bed in the morning.

Just horrendous.

And the eco thing - I can just hear Mrs Thunberg.... "Greta I know you're all about climate change sweetheart but we live in fecking SWEDEN and it's fecking JANUARY so leave the fecking thermostat alone".

So I don't think children brought up in a house without central heating automatically equals abuse

Living in a house without central heating isn't the same as choosing not to use the heating and making your children live in the freezing cold, though.

It sounds bloody miserable and slightly exaggerated. How can you drink 'copious' amounts of tea from one kettle full? Unless it's a kettle the size of a fish tank.

Even more exaggerated than that, given that the kettle is presumably also somehow filling hot water bottles at night time.

You wear a vest? What a vision of sexiness 🤣