Not going to put the heating on this winter. How to keep warm

[ClementineKelandra]

I will have the heating on for one hour a day in the evening so the kids can shower but then after that the heating and hit water will be completely off.

I just need to get some ideas for keeping the house warmer once the weather turns.

Forgot to add the cinema- many of our parents' and grandparents' generation spent long evenings at the cinema, where it was warm. Films were longer and there were shorts at a newsreel as well. Also they went to the pub and working mens' clubs a lot more. Part of this was to benefit from the heat.

PigletJohn you're right there. But did you know that miners got free coal themselves? My grandad was a miner, didn't own the little terraced house he lived in. But they had a great grange in the kitchen and a coal delivery which was free, still is for miners.(Though there is an argument against that for environmental and health reasons).

Duchesse - you are way off mark with your -10c temperatures for Scotland. The coldest months (Jan and Feb) daytime are +5 or +6.

Average temperatures are not much use to you if you're the one sitting in your house at 3am when it's -20C (scroll down to temperature for averages and minima and maxima)

"The graphs show the average frequency of air and ground frost at Braemar and Edinburgh RBG. These show that the frost-free season is often as little as 3 months."

Duchesse - don't know how else to put this but you are speaking rubbish. I come from one of the coldest regions in Scotland so do actually know what I'm talking about. I also ski in the the French Alps where I refuse to ski when the temperature reaches -15 degrees.

It does not "get routinely below -15c degrees in Scotland"

Re water tanks in the loft.

The trick is actually to make sure they are inside the house's insulated and heated area.

So wrap and drape loft insulation over them, and don't put insulation under them. They will now receive warmth from the warm room below, and keep that warmth because of the covering insulation.

Then you can draughtproof and seal your loft hatch - which you want to do anyway as not only do you lose heat through it, but the warm, moist house air whistling into the loft will be depositing condensation all over your cold rafters, and soggy rafters will eventually rot.

or even - 10c !

I think we can agree that it routinely gets to -10 degrees for some nights each winter in Scotland. Not routinely at that temperature all the time, every day (although the wind chill factor can make it feel that way sometimes) but that Scotland has (al least recently) had predictably cold winters. Perhaps 'regularly' would have been a more precise word to use instead of 'routinely'. (As in: I regularly have a bath once a year whether I need it or not.) Winters were not as cold in Scotland 20 so years ago as now, for a time there was no snow to ski on year to year.

I also grew up in the 70s and 80s in a reasonably large 3 bed house with only one gas fire in the front room. There was the ice thing going on on the insides of our bedroom windows in winter, it wasn't pleasant but we just jumped out of bed and hopped about a bit to keep warm, got dressed quickly etc.
Winter was electric blankets, warm clothes, I can't remember a time without slippers when I lived at home. We were just used to it and it was a part of winter.

However I do think that now we are so used to central heating etc we feel the cold more, so we've decided to train our bodies this year to get used to lower temperatures. We haven't had the heating on yet but dp has put the woodburning stove on (installed last December, has almost paid for itself already) just for a few hours each evening after we've had tea. So instead of keep stacking it with wood, he lights it, and we only 'refill' it once so that its not burning much by the time we go to bed but the metal stove is still hot and radiating heat. We are determined this year to only use the central heating as an addition to the stove, unlike last year when the heating just came on then we put the stove on if it wasn't quite cosy enough in the front room.

Also we have a stovetop kettle which we keep on it,, provides hot water (not quite boiling just needs 20 seconds on the gas ring to finish off) a few times a night plus the water for one hot water bottle.

Then sometimes we put a pan of beans on it and toast bread in front of it - meal cooked for free! Or baked potatoes inside it.

One thing dp is really strict about, and me too since I realised he is right, is keeping the house dry. It feels so much warmer as you are only having to heat air, rather than damp air. The poster who said the warm air from the heated clothes dryer thingy goes into the house - well so does all the water out of the clothes.

We never ever ever dry clothes in the house - even if the rain stops for an hour or so I will bung some washing out on the days I'm at home, it makes a big difference, and then tumble dry only if I absolutely can't get it dry outside. The cost of the tumble dryer far outweighs the cost of heating damp air imo. Also, even when its bitterly cold we open all the doors for at least 10 mins every day to air the house. Old houses with open fires used to feel warmer cos they were so well ventilated. So yes to draught excluders when you are sitting still in the house and trying to keep heat in, a big fat NO to blocking up airbricks and making your house damp by lack of ventilation.

I am not going to suggest leaving the oven door open after cooking, cos when we were skint, use of the oven was limited as its expensive to run.

I agree with airing the house,I always open windows every day whatever the weather and always when cooking.

I know this is obvious but it's not been said - go out as much as possible during the day.

Free galleries, libraries, museums - all the municipal places that are well heated.

It's 16 degrees in my house so I'm currently sat outside in the car where it's roasting as its really sunny
Obviously that's not an option in the depths of winter but right now my car is 10 degrees warmer than my house. I've even got the dog with me - and my wifi still works to post this from outside.

laurie that's been suggested repeatedly.

Have a look on YouTube at diy solar heaters, I made a small one to test the idea, i tested outside with air temp of 2 deg c in January the air temp coming out of the top of the heater was reading 36 deg c , so it really does work. You can source a lot of the materials for free but have to be quite handy to build. Only works in the sun. One drawback of free heat.

"Only works in the sun"

We get very little sun in winter in my part of the world.

So you have to have the heater out in the sun to get heat from it?

Gosh, I am very surprised given that as recently as 2010 and 2011 it got down to -15C at night here in East Devon (not even Dartmoor where such weather is commonplace) for a fortnight at a time in two consecutive winters. I guess there must have been some kind of inversion from the top to the bottom of the British Isles going on where it was actually warmer in the north than the south.

All these suggestions, of how to just put up with it. And yy, before central heat, many people, particularly the young/children and elderly died as a direct result of open fires and their output, damp and respiratory problems, etc. Not much but a few posts about why people in 2013 in one of the richest countries on Earth are not able to eat AND afford a modicum of heat.

This thread inspires and depresses me in equal measure. I'm sad that people had to think like this, but I'm inspired by some of the idea because I feel like we should save energy and we have had some incredibly large bills).

Not one for when you're really skint, but I noticed a few posters mentions tumble dryers. We replaced ours when it conked out with an A rated condenser dryer. It was about £100 more expensive, but that hundred quid paid for itself within 6 months and I'd expect a lifespan of 7-10 years (our working hours make it difficult to hang out the washing through the week unless willing to get up at 5 and /or hang it out through the dew fall, which rather defeats the point IMO).

Tight flooring / skirting can make a huge difference. Our bills dropped massively when we fixed that. We weren't skint, so we fixed it when we got to it (replacing flooring & joinery which there were other really good reasons for doing), but had I realised how much it was costing us I would have been down siliconing the previous skirting to save in the interim.

Why are condenser driers better out of interest?

somebody mentioned up thread about tumble driers and dehumidifiers - could anyone recommend models/websites?

Keep the bath or shower water in the bath until it is completely cold - it warms up the bathroom a treat.

Does it not cause condensation?

For tumbledriers, the cheapest best buy vented is the AEG T65170AV if you can get it for £271

I got a vented Bosch, in the summer from John Lewis, it has now gone up to £309 and is the next cheapest vented. I like Bosch and I prefer vented, they are simpler so less to go wrong, and all the steam goes outside. I also like Siemens, and Miele if you can afford it.

Condensor drier best buys start at £280 for the Beko DSC64S. You can get a nice Miele for £1,000. Condensor driers do blow out a certain amount of steam, the cheaper ones tend to be worse.

Some people think they can't have a vented drier because of the steam snout, but you can get a core drill from a tool hire shop that will cut neat round holes in walls to fit the duct. It is so easy that when I hired one shortly after moving house, I did extra holes for a cooker hood, an extractor in the utility room, and the place where a shower was going to go, and even a spare hole in the room next to the bathroom in case one day I wanted it to be a laundry room. They are rather heavy.

p.s.
I hired it for half a day and was quite busy