I'm not used to living in a cold house, especially not a big one. But now when the heat is on, I look at all of the space that's being heated, and realize that I occupy an extremely small fraction of it (~0.05%). On most days I don't even set foot in the two spare bedrooms. Why heat them? Just heating the rooms I'm in is far better.
But even better than heating fewer rooms is just heating a body. Of course, our bodies produce heat themselves. I now wear flannel pajama pants, a sweater, and warm slippers in the evenings in my house to keep the body heat near me. It sounds like I'm 70 years old, but now I'm comfortable with the house at 66 degrees.
And I now have flannel sheets on my bed, as well as a down comforter, so I don't have to run the heat at all at night.
So that's my system for now. I keep the largest unused bedroom closed off so that it doesn't need to be heated, I dress warmly and have a warm bed. I now only need to heat my house to 66 degrees from 6-11pm, and don't run the heat at all at any other time (at least during the week).
Of course that's the low hanging fruit. Now I need to insulate my house better.
Can't you just turn off the heat completely? I mean, you live in Southern California. How cold would it get in the house if you didn't use the heat?
ReplyDeleteagreed - what about turning off the heat and buying a space heater?
ReplyDeleteDavid, I live in inland SoCal. It's both hotter in the summer and colder in the winter than it is on the coast. After being away on a cold weekend, my house was 51 degrees. I can't really deal with that. If you think about it, low 50s makes sense. The average high this time of year is 67 and the average low is 42. And the highs are short lived (11am-3pm). That is, the temp spends more time near the lows than near the highs in the winter because the sun is up less than half the day.
ReplyDelete