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.

www.isis-solar.com/#na

Oh god yes, longjohns and leg warmers and two pairs of socks.

And if you are going to have radiators on in the morning, clothes hung over them from the night before (or brought into bed in the morning).

Weve already draught proofed the front door and vestibule door. It made a hell of a difference (why didnt we do it before!!). Also, weve got no double glazing but secondary glazing on the side windows of the bay windows at the front of the house. we gonna buy the window film to cover all windows with no sec glazing. our living room is like a fridge atm cos the underlay is worn down so desp needs a new one. Gonna underline all the curtains too. We live opposite the docks and its gets v windy at times. Thick blankets here and fluffy dressing gowns. Dp is my hot water bottle ;-) will be putting my winter thick fleece quilt cover. . Needs to put curtains or blinds up in the kitchen as it just bare window.

Last time I could not afford heating was when I lived in a big house with storage heaters, which are evil. I got by with lots of hot drinks (fill a massive thermos so you are not always boiling the kettle) and I would sit at computer or in front of telly in a sleeping bag. Extra duvets with the top one tucked in, and hot water bottles at the bottom and top of the bed.

I have radiator dryers which hang in front of the radiators without interfering with their heat output, but you can put quite a bit of clothing on them. Some of mine have 5 rungs. I think I got them from Lakeland or somewhere - invaluable..... Lidl or Aldi sometimes have them on offer. (They had thermals last weekend)

I also have a clothes dryer which sits on top of the bath - to save too much damp, I open the bathroom window a little to let fresh air in.

I've also got curtains which I just hung on a springloaded curtain rail across the wall where the front door is. They work brilliantly - except when the cats decide to use them as a loo

Not sure how we're going to get through the winter this year without freezing, two years ago it cost ?600 to fill the oil tank, this year it's ?860 (we need about two tanks to keep the house warm all winter). It's not too cold here yet, but it gets much colder than England in the heart of winter (-15° is a regular occurrence).

My grandmother tells me her kids were covered in goose fat and baking parchment under their clothes to help keep warm (and they were middle class), I don't think my family would accept that method though!

We haven't got any curtains in the house because we have outside shutters which are great during the night, I think I may be going to ikea though to get some fleeces to make some temporary curtains.

I also love the idea of double draft excluders.

We pay £45 a month, but our meter reading fuel costs are £17-£20 a month over the summer, so we're about £300 up atm (family of 4, 4 bed semi, North-West England).
We have lots of insulation, and haven't had the heating on yet, but expect to in the next few weeks.
Hats are good for keeping warm, wooly ones trap warm air best.

Ive got a gas fire in the lounge and put gas ring on to heat the kitchen,that way i dont need to use the heating untill the childrens bathtime,it was cheap last year doing this.
My central heating is so clanky that its often better not to have it on.

we had no heating last year and were lent 2 halogen heaters, 2 fan heaters and 3 small oil filled heaters. It was so cold last year we had to have some form of heat in all the rooms we used. Our Bill was £900+. I don't think any form of electric heater is cheap to run. I think you would be better to put the gas central heating on and run just to take the nip off the air. Most of us, run our heating with thermostats set between 15-20C, you could set to about 12 so that the house doesn't get cold. Once the walls lose the heat that they retain it is harder to heat up the house. It will also prevent burst pipes.

Reading with interest! My mum thinks I'm bonkers not having the heating on already! House is getting cold about 15 at the moment & DDs room is 14.3 (just checked) but it is really draughty despite the draught excluder & shut curtains! (Need to get some cheap fleece blankets to hang up round the front door) Trouble is we really don't have the money to even go out & buy the bits to stop the house being cold without the heating on IYSWIM. We have a large, unused, open fire in our living room & wanted to get a chimney balloon, but just didn't have the spare cash to do it!

DD doesn't feel the cold it would appear. I'm freezing right now, and need a nose warmer before my nose freezes completely & drops off!! But she is insisting that she is not cold!

For now my only advice is hot drinks/food & keep moving as much as you can & layers layers layers!!

Only boil the water you need in a kettle.

Insulating foam strips for doors and windows, it costs about £1.99 a roll and stopped the wind howling through the front door in our house.

Make sure the postman puts all letters through the letterbox properly. I have come home to a freezing house because the wind has been blowing through a propped open letter box all day.

Buy curtains from charity shops and tack them up behind your existing curtains. The really ugly patterened ones get sold off cheap and it doesn't matter because you won't see them.

A quick blast from a hairdryer warms up a cold bed within seconds. I love doing this [hgrin]

Cook large amounts of food together so you only use the oven and hob once. I often put a casserole on and then throw in some jacket potatoes and a quiche or pie.

Old pillow or even bag stuffed with newspaper instead of a proper chimney balloon.

I tie pretty ribbons to mine, weighted with a pine cone dangling right in the fire place, so I can't forget and light the fire without removing the pillow. Not that this would ever happen oh no.

Agree very sad , TartyMcFarty , but would say that any government in a capitalist system is fundamentally hostile to its citizens & exists only to further the interests of the few < ahem >

Oh and IME , forgetting to remove warm hat now & then during long evenings leads to a worsening of any existing hair loss problem [hblush]

The propped open letter box is a real bugbear of mine. If you really can't change the ways of the postman and arseholes who lodge a rolled up leaflet in your letterbox, I've been thinking of a thick, cloth "footless sock" attached to the door around the letterbox, long enough to drape over the protruding ends of letters.

I never tried this, but I imagine you could fasten it by loosening the screws of the letterbox brush or inner plate, jamming the fabric behind and tightening again. Not elegant, but possibly useful.

Leave the water in the bath after you have finished as the latent heat will radiate into the room.

My mum used to put clean washed house bricks in the oven whilst tea was cooking and then wrap them in old towels and put them our beds-made a hell of a crash if you pushed them out in the night by mistake

Probably should add a caution that both the above could be dangerous for small children but we survived

I try to spend as much time as possible at my parents' modern house. It's 15ish years old and very warm. Ours is 115ish years old and I can't feel my fingers while I type this....

Our landlord was thinking of putting central heating into our freezing in winter house but then said he would have to increase the rent so we haven't bothered. We don't have central heating but have 2 shitty storage heaters upstairs and 2 ancient gas fires downstairs. It is baltic in here in the winter. We have been here 4 years so know that soon it will be time to:

Put the electric blanket on the bed
Get the hot water bottles out to use ALOT not just at bed time but on the sofa too.
Get more blankets out for the lounge
Wear more layers
Not spend much time hanging around in the house.

This house is gorgeous in the spring and summer but a bastard in the winter months.

Loving this thread. And although it's sad in some ways (obviously I am not trivialising AT ALL the horror of facing genuine debt problems) it does have its upside. Let's face it, we have all been consuming too much energy (and, arguably, spending too money) for a long time, and if the current economic situation forces us to rediscover a bit of thrift, then it's not all bad.

I hadn't really thought about draughts, but have just bought one of those double excluders on Amazon.

Also, re letterbox brushes - do they actually work? And how do you fit them (I have a letterbox set on a very thick wall, so it might be hard to attach brush to the back of the flap - can I just put it on the inside wall instead ?)

Also - re cavity walls. We had ours done last year and it made a dramatic difference. However, we have an open fire in the living room, and they insisted on fitting a wall vent. This causes such a draught that it actually makes bits of paper on the floor blow around if it's too windy . Can I block it up, or stuff the hole with something, or would that be unsafe??

Letterbox brushes are fitted to inside wall/door.

Wall vent for fire sounds only necessary when you use the fire, so can be covered in between times ? although they'll never tell you this because building regs prefer safety features not to be dependent on the user's behaviour.

But actually it sounds a bit odd that the installers insisted on a wall vent in the first place. There's a calculation about airflow and volume of air in room necessary to safely use any open burner (to prevent CO build-up), but for example in my house the draft below the internal room door was deemed sufficient to meet the airflow needs, and ventilation grills in the bottom of a door would also work.

We've oil central heating (not on mains gas) even with a new combi-condenser boiler and a well-insulated, double glazed 2 bed cottage the cost of heating is scary. The price of heating oil has ROCKETED over the last couple of years: it makes burning £10 notes seem a sensible and viable alternative fuel. SO though we're not really skint, we heat the house as little as possible. Our last house had an LPG boiler which was even worse. I love the tips so far!
I would add:
if you've an upstairs, then use the bedroom/s which are above the warmest downstairs room.
Use as few rooms as possible and don't heat areas that you don't need to - stairway, hallway, bathroom - we're not in them long enough to benefit from them being a civilized temperature (the water in our toilet cistern froze last winter though, so maybe am a but too extreme about that!um. )
Sunlight really heats rooms up, so think about removing things that shade windows (assuming they're not north facing draughty ones!). e.g. reduce the height of hedges, remove net curtains.
When you go to bed, dry your clothes in the room you've been using. I hang laundry from curtain-poles in the day.
If you can- move white goods that give off heat to rooms that you actually use; esp if they aren't very energy efficient.

Tianc - Fab idea, I shall get DH to help with that at the weekend!

I grew up in a house in Ireland in the 70's/80's with no heating only a coal fire in one room. We usually did the following in the winter -

Curtains over the front/back door
Door sausages along most doors (draught excluders)
We wore fleecy all in ones with feet in to bed (I'm sure I've seen similar in Sainsburys kids clothes at the mo)
Hot water bottles
Dressing under the bed clothes in the morning
Stayed in the one room that was heated during the evening
Got dressed for bed in same warm room
Extra layers on the bed (it was like a reverse princess and the pea!)
All had baths in the bathroom one after another so the room was warm
Drank lots of tea, not sure if that was for the cold or just as that's what you do in Ireland

Good luck with those bills [hsmile]

bebeballroom we found our chimney balloon just kept falling down - a tightly wedged piece from a cardboard box seemed to do a better job - cut to size and wedged across the chimney.

We have economy 7, so storage heaters and plug in panel heaters (no mains gas). For those who asked about drying clothes, I put a rail up in the airing cupboard and put wet clothes on hangers. I dry them over night with either the heat off the pipes (as the water gets heated and stored in the tank) or with a plug in oil filled heater (which is cheaper to run at night as that is my cheap rate time). I leave the door open and the heater heats the hall way too.

Another one with oil central heating here - have just been quoted £150 per month for a year's worth of oil. This is based on the amount we used this year. Am therefore trying to economise greatly, although DH is holding out for hot baths every night. Shall pootle off to Ikea at the weekend for fleecy curtain liners.