For those who can't afford to use central heating this year - How are you going to cope?

[mama2moo]

We have 2 dd's - 3yo and 20mo and already owe money to our suppliers. We are going to have to be careful with not using the heating too much but our house is feeling cold already!

We have bought thermal vests, fleece pjs, fleece tops and extra duvets.

What else can we do?

TBH Im dreading it. By the 3rd week of every month we are skint at the moment.

Honestly, its not so bad at the moment. The ex is due to pay me some CM arrears this week coming which will clear my credit card. The car has passed its MOT. I have a new job which is term time only so have saved childcare money. And I won £200 of John Lewis vouchers from Mumsnet which have already 3/4 gone on Christmas and birthday presents for the family so I dont even need to get in debt with that. And my wonderful friend and her fabulous teenage sons are giving us their unwanted DSs really cheap for my sons' main Christmas presents. So I am genuinely ok at the moment.

I was pointing out though, that not everyone on Mumsnet is well off. I have been in worse situations than now - been made homeless in the past and left by the ex in £3k of debt - but for now (touch wood) everything is working out ok and its not too much of a struggle. I am breaking even, and the car is behaving!

In relative terms I work 25 hours a week for £700 a month. My childcare is £440 a month. I get tax credits, and a little housing benefit (thank god for council housing) but this is how some of us live. We arent wasting our money on luxuries. We have 10 year+ old appliances, we eat Asda smartprice food, we budget hard.

But I have 2 wonderful children, a good job, and enough money at the moment to be able to go and buy the odd bottle of wine at the moment. I just miss the days where I earnt £2500 a month and had so much disposable income I never even needed to check my bank balance!

In response to some of the comments today I would say that
a) decorhate - your comments sound just like the mealy words of the Govt and the energy saving "tips" of the power companies. Comparable with advising us to turn off lights when the actual problem is that we are shelling out £150 a month heating the house (two storage heaters and portables).
b) insulation grants are not, and to my knowledge never have been, available for solid wall insulation. The whole concept of grants is flawed anyway. If you can afford to pay 50%, 75%, whatever then you have a chance of paying the whole whack. Many people will never be able to afford to match the grant. Yet another example of "to those who have more will be given".
c) when you are potentially snowed in for days on end and you live in an isolated rural community, the internet is actually pretty darned essential in this day and age.
d) why exactly SHOULD people who are working their socks off have to do without absolutely everything - not luxuries, just the things that make life more bearable - in order to line the pockets of the power companies?

This has possibly already been mentioned but the best thing I have done in my 1950s cement property with single glazing is to buy a HUGE sheet of bubble wrap, think of the stuff you get on new appliances ect and tape this to the windows. One side of my living room is windows and PVC glazing which obviously let's lots of heat out. I just tapped the entire thing up, floor to ceiling ensuring that there were no gaps. The plastic let's the light in but it keeps the heat in - there was a noticeable couple of degrees difference once it went up. I used masking tape which kept it up until march when I was ready to remove it and it is still perfectly good and will be going up again next weekend.

Also if you can't afford to buy which I think many on the thread possibly can't then I would recumbent going to a large hardware retailer - they often have big packages which arrive and are done up in bubble wrap, some will let you have it for nothing as it simply goes in their skip anyway.

Another thing my cousin suggested was sharing beds, obviously this is not practical for everyone but last winter her two 'top and tailed' to give each other that little bit of extra warmth.

My mum suggested going round to someone else's for dinner or to stay. One family/couple cooks or acts as host while the other comes for food or to stay and then you swap over. Again not practical for everyone but you can save on a couple of nights by only heating one house at a time/using one cooker or oven between you and making sure it is done equally between you.

Not really sure what else to offer - hope some of it has been useful.

I haven't read ANY of this thread and don't know whether OP's still here. Your suppliers won't leave you unsupplied, they'll put in PAYG meters. That's what I've got. It's more expensive, but does mean you can stick a fiver on it as often as possible and this is better than not being able to pay a £250 bill in January.

Depending on what benefits you get, you might get £25 a week when it stays below freezing for the whole week. Mine come up for review at the turn of the year, so I go back onto minimum payments then (thanks, ATOS) so I put as much as possible on the meters before Christmas.

I'm a very un-British cold wuss, so I start 'training' myself in October by turning the heating down by 1 degree every two weeks. By the really cold weather, I should be okay at 17deg during the day and 12 at night. You shouldn't have it below 13 with small children or immune-compromised people, really, at any time.

Leave the heating on and use the programmer to alter the settings to suit your life. Even with up-to-the-minute, efficient boilers, it takes more fuel to heat a house up from freezing than to keep it ticking over (and it feels nicer! Bonus!) If your heating's inefficient, this is even more important.

Insulate. I'm plastering that silver padding stuff (on offer from Wickes) around all the cold spots, and bugger how it looks. If you haven't got double glazing, use that cling-film stuff (also from Wickes) that tightens round the windows with a hairdryer. If you haven't got thick curtains, pad them with blankets (attach them to the back of the curtain with safety pins.)

This house hasn't got proper floors on the ground floor so, last year, I layered blankets and rugs in the living room. I bought them from charity shops.

You will need to use hot water bottles, blankets, duvets, furry socks and layers. Even muffled up, I feel the cold on my face and hands but at 16/17 degrees I'm okay with the layers and socks. Drink hot drinks, it helps.

Everyone's priorities are different but I sacrifice food quality for fuel. In the winter, I live on rice, pasta and lentils made into samey, but satisfying, meals with mince. I use the slow cooker and microwave a lot as my cooker isn't that fuel-efficient, whereas small appliances are.

Run around a lot and keep reminding yourself the summer will come!

Good tips. The other thing we did in the past was to just close off half the house. So we basically moved downstairs and all slept in the one room. This ended up lasting for 18 months as we couldn't bear to move back to the arctic upstairs again even in summer!

fantastic thread. smokinaces, your 20:30 post is exactly, well, me. identical in every detail. You are all an inspiration :)

Oooohhh, ok, thanks Tianc

No, you can't open the windows. Yes, you can fit it over mini-panes - just stick it to the outer edges of the frame. It won't work if you stick it to every pane, as the point is to cover all gaps! You take it off in the Spring.

Overcome your curtain aversion. There's a reason why Victorians loved curtains and draught-excluders - and most of us are living in houses they built!

Someone said that the fuel companies won't leave us without heating but will put in a pay meter.....Well mine are threatening to do that, which would be ok but they want to charge me £240 to do it to gain access! I've emailed them and said to just come and do it but they are not answering me! I owe the whole of last quarters fuel bill plus £100 from the previous quarters. Don't know where the money is coming from. I am also worried that they will do big charges on the meter if/when i eventually get one, so that i pay £20 but only, say, get £2.00 of electric from that. I know its my fault cos i owe money but i just never have money for the fuel bill anymore..... I'm doing all the heating tricks from this thread and did them last year aswell but i still find the bill adds up to far too much!!

They will load your meter charges to cover the arrears. Sounds like you need an advocate to make them keep your 'charges' to a minimum and spread your arrears over the longest time. Try the CAB. I didn't pay to get the meters put in, I could hardly keep them away!!

By an advocate do you mean CAB will talk to them on my behalf? God that would be brilliant! I'm terrified of getting that extra cost added, but also worried about the extra charge they will load onto my meter. But theres no way round it i need to go onto a meter it will stop this bill that nearly kills me each quarter! Thanks for your reply

gaelicsheep, loved your post about cuddling up together downstairs!

When I was a child, we used to top-and-tail AND get dressed & undressed in bed. That's a bit grim for grown-ups, but kids don't mind.

I can't get over the difference in approaches here. We got into arrears in our previous property because I KNEW we weren't paying enough and phoned them many times to ask to increase the direct debit and they insisted the payment was OK. Low and behold we ended up owing them nearly £1000. BUT it just got carried over when we moved and they upped the direct debit to start clawing it back. They still weren't going to set it high enough - I asked for it to be higher.

I think part of this is that the power companies themselves don't appreciate the cost of running storage heaters, so when I told them we needed to pay £120 a month they laughed it off. The estimated bills we used to get were totally laughable compared with the reality of our usage.

We are finally close to clearing the debt, 4 years on. But the point of this ramble is that I simply can't believe how badly other people are treated.

I believe they will :) Make an appt asap and get all your bills, banks statements and such together for them Also tell your provider you're talking with the CAB. I bet you anything, as soon as you've got a case reference they'll drop all those stupid charges.

sorry, xpost. was to oksonow.

garlicbreathZombie. I am just so so grateful to finally live in a reasonably comfortable house, all things told. Really feeling for people here.

You dont have to go on a keymeter. I used to pay weekly, on a payment card. They put an amount in place (like £20 a week) which was to pay 50% of arrears, 50% towards new bill. It took a while, but with weekly regular payments the debt came down and I paid off the next bill. I didnt have to go to key meter, but I had to keep to the payment plan. They are like plastic credit cards you can pay on at any PayPoint shop.

I use a keymeter now, and am happy with that, but it was in when I moved here.

Thank you garlicbreath and also smokin for your info. Gaelic, mine are storage heaters too and the fuel companies just don't realise what a money burner they are! I see what you mean, if they know i'm talking to CAB they might hold back abit. Thanks.

Strangely enough I don't actually mind the storage heaters now because although they're expensive the place is actually comfortable these days. We even reached 18 degrees one day last winter when it was minus 15 outside. Nothing short of miraculous. We've come a long way from the days when I spent every winter with chilblains on every toe and shivered my way through the evening with three jumpers on.

At least we're not reliant on oil like some of our neighbours, who ran out and couldn't get deliveries because of the snow.

Just thought of something else that may not have been mentioned and that's a portable calor gas heater. If you're lucky you may find someone who has one in the garage to give away (we did) and although the cylinders are expensive they're a useful fallback in a power cut or in particularly cold weather.

Once again on the subject of storage heaters, I would urge people to make sure they're using them properly. It's amazing how many people don't know how to use them, and the power companies are often clueless too.

If you are ever able to replace them it is worth it - might even be worth approaching a good landlord about this. We got into debt with one of the ancient ones that totally eats electricity and gives very little in return. We now have a couple of new automatic ones that actually weren't too expensive and we are reaping the rewards because they only take the charge they need and you don't need to remember to fiddle with them every day.

Thanks for your bubblewrap tip, InsomniaQueen. I'm going to copy that for the windows in my so-called conservatory (= single-layer shed with holes) alongside lining the walls with silver stuff. Should make a huge difference.

YY re storage heaters! The insurmountable problem is that, if you're at home all day - as I am, and of course SAHPs with small DC - they don't stay warm enough, long enough, to keep you comfortable. If you turn them up during the day, they run out by 5pm. Turn them on boost and you're paying something 5x the price for electricity.

I assume they were invented by some bloke with a 9-5 job, who completely forgot to ask his wife and children if they were warm enough!!

gaelic, i think thats where i've been going wrong. My storage heaters are ancient. I think they've been in here for over thirty years!!! I have to set the input level and then set the output level depending on how cold it is. They give out very little heat but cost fortunes to use! I'm in a ha house and i have contacted them so many times about these heaters. Your new ones sound really brilliant compared to the old ones, didn't know they did automatic ones!

But you would still be on mega-expensive electricity during the day, wouldn't you.

We should have a whole thread about storage heaters! The thing is, and I have sussed this since we got proper insulation, is that storage heaters WITHOUT decent insulation or another source of heat like a stove are just worse than useless. It's all about building up heat layer on layer on layer so that eventually the house itself is warm, not just the air.

Also all the competitive freezing threads on Mumsnet are not applicable to storage heaters. As I said the whole point is that you are storing heat, not just in the heaters themselves but in the fabric of the house. This is what storage heaters do. They don't throw out huge quantitites of heat like a convection heater, they heat the fabric of the house. This is why it is so crucial that you don't leave it too late to put them on because once the house loses that heat it really does take weeks to regain it. Similarly never turn them off if you're going away for a few days.

You should really be leaving the output on zero for as long as possible in the day. The more modern storage heaters will automatically shut down the output when they charge and gradually open it up as they shed core heat, so you can theoretically leave it on, say, 3 all the time and not worry (although I still worry so leave them on zero output unless I'm freezing). Zero output still gives out heat.

Mathius automatic storage heater Not cheap, but definitely cheap compared with putting in central heating. We got ours from the Scottish Hydro shop and they were delivered free (other brands charge about £30 or £40 delivery per heater because of the weight of the things).