Looking ahead to winter - recommendations for cold living room?

[WireSkills]

Our house was built in the 1990's. Generally it seems pretty well insulated, but the living room is always cold. Handy in summer (until the sun comes round late afternoon/evening), but is a nightmare in winter, let alone with fuel bills going the way they are.

The main issues are:

• box bay window with a lead effect canopy over the top (like the picture on this page - link). I have no idea what insulation, if any, is between the roof line and the canopy, but on the basis that any bird or cat that lands on it sounds like they're coming in through the roof, I'm guessing not much.
• trickle vents in the windows
• the air brick, which is basically just a hole in the side of the house to the outside world. It's covered on the inside with one of these covers (link) but it's effectively just a very thin bit of plastic so not exactly thermally efficient.
• wooden floor in a cold room = no retained warmth

We do have a gas fire which I hate but DH loves. Even before these increases in prices I thought the gas fire was the equivalent of chucking £10 notes in the flames, so I'm really, REALLY reluctant to let DH use it this year. I know air bricks are there to protect you against CO2 poisoning from a gas fire, but we do also have the blasted trickle vents and a CO2 alarm (plus the lack of use of the fire too).

Would it be OK to cover/block the air brick over winter?? I obviously don't want to kill us 😂

Does anyone have any recommendations/experience of similar box bay canopies and whether the insulation can be improved?

The other annoying thing is that there is only one small radiator in the whole 15' x 12' room (probably because the house builders expected you to use the gas fire to heat the room), and there's a sofa in front of it that can't go anywhere else. I keep pulling the sofa forward to create some space for the heat to rise, but the bloody thing keeps moving back, thanks to the wooden floors (which are also freezing!)

Or do I conceded defeat and just buy some blankets instead?!

Could you change your radiator to a bigger one? Or add a second one? It made a big difference in our kitchen.

Thanks!

Clearly I didn't take my chemistry exams beyond GCSEs! 😂

I'm not sure about the air bricks though. When British Gas come round to service it, they always make a point to say we have to leave the gaping hole in the wall vent open when we're using the fire.

The gas fire is the original fire from when the house was built and based on the amount of heat it kicks out (DH actually got the living room so hot using it once I was nearly sick from overheating!), it's definitely not energy efficient. I think we may still have the original instruction manual so I'll look it up to see the usage stats.

Unfortunately not re the sofa. There's nowhere else for it to go in the room, or elsewhere in the house, and no armchairs to replace it with.

With the heating on for an hour last night the room got up to 20 degrees, which is perfectly fine for me, but DH was whinging. He's already whinging less than he was, so he'll get over it! It did rapidly cool down again once the heating turned off, and wasn't very pleasant.

I've actually ordered a room thermometer so he can see what the temperature is in there (I took my alarm clock in last night to test it). He doesn't understand that just because the thermostat in the cold hallway is set to 17 degrees that it doesn't mean the whole house is at 17 degrees!

Thanks for the rug suggestions too - will take a look at them. It's quite a big room, so I'll have to get the tape measure out tonight to see which size works best. May even need two to cover off both sofas.

Might end up being cheaper to pay for the heating costs at this rate!

Interesting earlier point re the oil filled rad though. We have one in our conservatory, which we've not turned on yet - we're just closing off the conservatory. I'll see if I can do some price comparisons between that and the gas fire, so if we want a top up heat, then we can use whichever is cheaper.

I appreciate we're in a more fortunate financial position than a lot of people, but I'd much rather have more money in my bank account to donate to our local food bank, than put it in the bank account of a money grabbing energy provider.

We could some thermal blinds (honeycomb structure) for our massive lounge window. Makes a big difference in the evening but cost £600!

This is a most excellent website - much, much more affordable - thank you!

Thanks! These rugs look great. How’s the quality?

We have those in our conservatory - I agree - they make a massive difference, but yes, they're very expensive!

Get a price for a tall radiator to be fitted like this: www.plumbworld.co.uk/duratherm-vertical-oval-tube-single-panel-designer-radiator-1600-x-480mm-white-1142-1259536?utm_source=organic&utm_medium=shoppingfeed&utm_campaign=googlecss&gclid=CjwKCAjw4c-ZBhAEEiwAZ105Rdw99wufILvS1gbz9y9S8Wulmnfuk_lKzHrzcewv9IB8lcPKEmbPoBoC66oQAvD_BwE.

Obv check it's got sufficient BTU for the room, as it sounds like your current one doesn't. These will at least be taller than the sofa which is good.

Have you considered just putting a curtain pole at the front of the bay and closing it off with floor to ceiling curtains for evenings? Have your sofa outside the bay. Obv open curtains in the day for airing.

Wear solid soled slippers, not slipper socks or soft soles - that makes a huge difference on wood floors.

Don't seal up too much otherwise it'll cause you damp.

Rugs are brilliant and thermal curtains. Pricey unless you find them on FB Marketplace or ebay.

I recently found bargains on ebay. They were brand new!! Rug was only £20.

Can you stuff some old tights and make a draft excluder?

@Newhousecrying they're great, I've used them in 4 of my rooms - no different in quality to any other mass market rugs (eg ikea or dunelm type ones) they're also cheap enough that I don't have to be too worried about shoes etc accidentally going on them!

I couldn’t believe it when I moved in. Felt the draft coming from the vents, opened them and was shocked to find out I was looking at the open air into the garden. So main living room has 2 gaps to the outside world which are ineffectually covered by a piece of thin white plastic.

Maybe do a test with your oil filled radiator? Put it on for an hour a day for a month in the evening before it gets too cold and see if there is much effect on your elec bill? I use mine quite a lot and the cost must be fairly negligible as my monthly usage of elec is below average household use.

If it kicks out a lot of heat that's not necessarily a bad sign regarding energy efficiency! If it was very energy inefficient most of the heat would be lost up the chimney instead of heating the room.

Does it have different settings? Or just on/off?

It's one of these delightful little numbers (not my house, but a similar one off Rightmove!). I'm never the one to turn it on as I hate it so much, but I believe it has a low or high setting.

You can guess which one DH uses...

It's certainly effective in heating a room up - I just dread to think how much gas it uses to do it. I'm hoping one year British Gas will say something's wrong with it and condemn it completely, but the bloody thing seems unbreakable!

Perhaps when we do up the downstairs and put in carpet, DH might be able to be convinced to swap it for something more modern, efficient and attractive that doesn't smell absolutely awful when it's on!

@Agnes12 - yup - same with our air brick. I can see daylight through it too when the slide is open and it also has one of those very thin plastic covers on it.

I know it's important to ventilate a place for carbon monoxide and humidity purposes, but my god it seems ridiculous to just expect people to live in a country that gets cold in winter with a great whacking hole in the side of their house, open to the elements!

I think the oil filled radiator might be one of the answers. Also, it can go next to DH's sofa, which then means he gets the most benefit and stops moaning.

I've found some cheap thermal curtains at Dunelm that I'll try and get this weekend for upstairs. In the living room I am battling with the poor window design.

We've got blinds, but curtains are difficult. If we curtained off the whole bay the sofa would have to come so far forward we wouldn't be able to open the living room door. Part of me quite likes the idea of a little sofa fort behind the curtain though... on a sunny day I could see myself disappearing behind it with a good book, the cats and a glass of wine! 😂

I hate those sodding trickle vents! Bonkers to make a lovely new double glazed window then cut a hole through to outside with a flimsy bit of plastic over it. Maybe open the vent, try a piece of clingfilm or suchlike if you can, then close over it. Ours open like a flap, if yours don't then maybe a piece of clear stickyback plastic to fit, should not be noticeable and easy to remove.

Don't be too hard on your partner for the fire. I don't know precise numbers but fa's his still much cheaper than the equivalent electricity. On 'more or less' (I think' the other day they were saying that for cooking, the most expensive is electric oven, cheaper is an air fryer, but cheapest is a gas oven. From my not-too-reliable memory it was about a third of the cost per heat unit.

This sounds very like our living room.

We had a wood stove fitted 4 years ago and it's amazing at heating the room - and lots of the rest of the house!) but before that (and when we don't want to light a fire) we use heated throws.

We've had cheaper ones from Amazon/Aldi etc and they were ok but we've all got the husky Dreamland ones now and they're SO good.

Yes indeed, and you're right. I was just warning people about stopping up too many other vents, I should have made it clear, sorry.

They are there to prevent damp, amongst other things. I only close ours if it is very cold and windy.