only heat the room you are in

[Willmafrockfit]

this is my dm
i think she has read this
she is in her late 80s, she is getting help from the government, being a pensioner
for gods sake heat your house!

i think she loves being a martyr but it is driving me mad!

I've been reading the meter every day so I'll be able to report back

We were always told there were more lung problems in time gone by because of this, there can be rot in the walls. Plus a plumber told us to heat each room for a short amount of time at least once a month

i have the radiators on low upstairs but no heating on unless i put it on, ie when i get up and at some other point during the day/evening
i love being cosy in bed with a cold bedroom.

again the bbc are still saying heat one room, sure that is fine, but if you are subsidising pensioners they should be able to heat their houses comfortably, without fear.

My suspicion is that the boiler cost is relate to the power of the boiler

So having it on for an hour costs the same independent of number of radiators assuming it's fired up the whole time

If you get to a comfortable temperature in that time the boiler may switch off/be switched off so it could be that in an hour you end up with the boiler not running for a full hour especially if you are only heating one room as all the heat goes into that one room not shared between many rooms

But if you are trying to get to a specific temperature it will cost more to heat a larger area / have more radiators on ( doors to unheated rooms should be shut)

Whether or not you notice a cost difference if it's only on for an hour depends on the starting temperature and your heat loss rate ( which I suspect depends on outside temperature)

Ie you have the boilers on for 1 hr costs the same but the ending room temperatures may be lower if all rooms are being heated

To get everything to say 18 would cost more if you heat the whole house rather than one room

Withnoshoes · Yesterday 16:29
MrsSkylerWhite · Yesterday 13:21
Not so long ago, everyone did. Central heating is relatively new. I didn’t have any until I left the family home and bought a new flat, in the 80s.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s we didn’t have central heating. We had storage shitty heaters and ice on the windows in bedrooms in very cold winter. we had hot water bottles.

BUT we had two bloody fires on all the time downstairs.

Just because people didn’t have central heating. They didn’t go without heating their homes and sucking it up. Fire and being warm has been around forever.”

we did 🤷‍♀️ I grew up in 60s and 70s. My then very unusual single mum worked and provided for us. A two bar electric fire, rationed to a couple of hours in the evening, was all she could afford.

A crucial factor is which rooms have thermostatic controls - if the sole thermostat is in an unheated room the boiler will always be on regardless of how warm it gets in the heated rooms so that's probably going to be less efficient than heating the room with the thermostat so the boiler goes off when the desired temperature is reached. Having thermostatic controls on individual radiators or moving the thermostat to the heated room can make single room heating much more efficient. Depending on internal/external insulation and layout there's a good chance you'll still get enough heat leaking through to the rest of the house to avoid serious damp problems but always good to monitor this.