We are too used to Central heating..

[Dampclout]

Until the 1980s very few houses had central heating. Most people heated one room, had hot water bottles at bedtime and wore warm clothes. I can recall quickly going out of the warm front room and shutting the door behind me, if I wasn't quick enough there would be be the shout of ‘shut that door’
Nowadays I wear a tee shirt in winter and keep my house at 20c… I think I will be going back to my childhood ways this winter..

I do agree with the centement of this post. I have a family member whose house is kept v warm. I find it uncomfortable. When i visit, i always open the bedroom window otherwise its stiffeling no matter the month. Equally, when they visit me, the constantly moan about being cold. I know a few others who keep the temperature high as standard too. I am in my 30's but even growing up in the 90's, you would use hot water bottles and wear thicker jumpers in the winter. I think the more you heat a house and become used to it, the more difficult it is to drop a couple of degrees even if you are still at a perfectly adequate temperature because you become acclimatised and feel the cold that bit more.

20 degs is not some tropical temperature, it is a pretty standard temperature to set your thermostat to.

Also, remember to have at least 4 kids, because the child mortality rates in cities in the 1840s was around 50%. A small bit of typhoid is character building.

So we’re too used to being warm, from someone who likes being warm. Wtf?

It’s like frugality olympics on here with who can sit in the cold for longest without turning on their heating. There is nothing virtuous about accepting the erosion of our living standards. There is nothing smart about ‘being in it together’.

Being conditioned to accept that it is a dangerous slope.

If you live in Cornwall chances are you have damp in some part of your house even with heating... everytime people talk about just putting on jumpers all I can think of is the damp.

lol, get a load of all these people coming up with the Reagan "our way of life is not negotiable" rhetoric.

What if I told you you had no choice in the matter anyway?

Enjoy the central heating. It will be the least of your concerns now we're finally hitting the limits of our fossil fuelled civilisation. This is a self-induced issue, so I can only imagine what people will be saying when fossil fuels become scarce/too expensive purely because of geology, as they are doing.

By the way, the Tories have nothing to do with this. Vote them out, by all means. It's not changing the situation one iota and was going to happen with the red team in the driver's seat given they ascribe to the exact same neoliberal, growth at all cost model.

We were exactly the same, electric heaters in my bedroom that I wouldn't dream of leaving my dc unattended with now.

Difference was my dad could boil kettle after kettle to fill all the hot water bottles, now the thought of that is staggering as I see my smart meter display shoot through the roof!!

In June some parts of the UK were as cold minutes 2 at night.
Not everyone in Britain has hot weather just because London and the south does.

This, very much this.

Pull up a census return from the 1860s. Its pretty typical to find a family of 10 sharing a 2 bed house. Then having a couple of lodgers living with them for added good measure. None of this 1 child per bedroom nonsense.

Of course we need central heating when we haven't got 4 kids sharing the same bed keeping each other warm.

For how much longer?

Yep. Children, unwell, disabled and elderly people shouldn't have to be freezing cold in their homes. As a healthy adult yes it's miserable but we should be able to cope ok. For lots of groups it's shocking to expose them to homes without heating.

What a reasoned post. I only wanted to point out that we managed before central heating, and my family didn't have an open fire but an electric bar fire and a pay as you go meter. We survived the winter of 1962, it wasn't fun but we got through it.

That was for antelopevalley.

You still need a flue. The 'Flueless' wood/gas burners are very difficult to get someone out to safety check and if you're renting, you have fat luck of getting permission for one.

Unless you're boiling literal barrels of water with that kettle every hour, I don't know why. It's 1 or 2 kilowatts and for a minute or two, tops. That's pennies, in fact, barely 2p at 25p/kWh for two minutes.

@antelopevalley Did you miss the bit in my post where I said I live in the North? Seriously, no-one should need to put their heating on in June!

It may have once upon a time been yours alone to contemplate, but since you have publicly posted here, I think we can all feel free to contemplate on the smugness of your post, not to mention boasting about your disgraceful waste of climate resources.

Sorry. Fuel should not have ever been something that brought a small proportion of the population untold wealth whilst simultaneously causing others to due.

Food. Water. Housing. Healthcare. Transport. Energy.

All of these things should be universally accessible and outside of capitalism.

See, this is why the market prices are shooting up so high. People can still afford these prices, ergo, the market has to cost for this demand destruction not happening at present prices. With insufficient supply, someone is going to go without. That will happen when prices hit enough people to pull back.

People affording to continue to use energy at profligate amounts will inevitably keep this process going until all but the richest are impacted massively.

It's not just a case of affording it; you may be able to afford foie gras and fur, that doesn't make it ethically acceptable.

Where I live now (in the UK) doesn't have central heating.

We put an electric heater on in the bedroom sometimes before bed in the very coldest nights of winter. We wear jumpers and use blankets in winter in the front room. We also keep the window open on all but the coldest nights

Nothing wrong with central heating. My house is 22 minimum all year round. I do not like to be cold and I will not be layering up in my own house.

Yet I seem to recall Jeremy Corbyn running on a manifesto that included contemplating re-nationalising energy and the railways and everyone hating it.

Or the Newspapers making them hate it. Either way.