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Thread: Keep your house cold this winter.

  1. #1

    Keep your house cold this winter.

    I'm posting this to help out anyone who might be wondering about how they're going to afford to heat their house this winter.....this might take some mental conditioning for some, so it might be good to start considering it now:

    Keep your house cold! This might seem obvious, but I'm always amazed at how many people consider this to be a foreign concept. We keep our house at 56 degrees in the winter. This isn't 56 degrees throughout the house - it's 56 degrees at the warmest point. Actually, it's 56 degrees on top of the refrigerator where we keep the thermometer. It's about two or three degrees colder at floor level. We keep several rooms completely shut off from the heat and they get a lot colder than that. A couple of rooms (without pipes) are below freezing.

    We've completely shut down our oil-burner and now heat exclusively with a pellet stove. We live in a large drafty house with the pellet stove on the first floor.

    Here are the good points to being cold:

    1.) It's much healthier for you. Many types of viruses cannot live in colder temperatures (excluding the flu virus).
    2.) It doesn't seem nearly as cold outside because there isn't nearly so much of a temperature difference to adjust to.
    3.) Obvious fuel savings.

    The bad points:

    1.) It's hard to acclimate if you visit someone who is living in a hot house (or if you work in a hot environment). If you bump up the heat when people visit it feels like you're in a sauna.
    2.) You have to keep a close eye on pipes to make sure that they don't freeze in outside walls.
    3.) If you have a cat, it will sleep on top of you (or try to craw under the blankets with you). This results in a lot of lost sleep.
    4.) You have to wear a lot of heavy clothes. Lots of blankets at night.

    The reverse goes for summer. We have box fans in the windows. No air conditioning.....

    It really makes the summer seem a lot nicer. It seems that a lot of our friends seem miserable in the heat because they live in an air conditioned house.

    The only drawback are those three or four nights every year where it's almost too hot to sleep.


    If it gets really cold we have to bump up the heat to keep the pipes from freezing. We've been really lucky for the last couple of years......it hasn't really gone much below ten degrees Fahrenheit.
    Last edited by 123tim; 07-30-2008 at 09:31 PM.



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  3. #2
    For those of you in Northern climates, I read a great article about sleeping comfortably in the cold--remember 4-post beds? If you construct something along those lines around your bed, draped with blankets, you can keep the house very cold and have your own little warm haven.

  4. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by amy31416 View Post
    For those of you in Northern climates, I read a great article about sleeping comfortably in the cold--remember 4-post beds? If you construct something along those lines around your bed, draped with blankets, you can keep the house very cold and have your own little warm haven.
    I recall the canopy beds and the curtains they had on some of them. It's like being in a tent. Not only that, it is dark and you don't get distracted by the light as easily.

  5. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by amy31416 View Post
    For those of you in Northern climates, I read a great article about sleeping comfortably in the cold--remember 4-post beds? If you construct something along those lines around your bed, draped with blankets, you can keep the house very cold and have your own little warm haven.
    Thanks for that Amy. This is something that I never considered. It would eliminate one other thing that I neglected to mention....the draft on your head at night.

  6. #5
    Been doing this for years.
    Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the Others enter into no rivalry with him. - Aristotle's Politics Book 5 Part 11

  7. #6
    My house is pretty cool this morning . 45 out last night .
    Do something Danke

  8. #7
    My average indoor winter temperature is about 50*. I heat with wood and I do have a small space heater in the bathroom kept on low. My place is small do it heats up fast. All summer long I make bundles out of sticks and paper. A tree fell in my yard after a storm and I had a lot of sticks to break into bundles.I haven't gotten the whole tree cut up yet but it will get cut up as winter get cold. It is a lot easier to cut wood when it is cold imo.

    I have started using rocket stoves in the green house and for out door cooking sites. The rocket stove principal is very practical and easy to set up even in emergency situations. But people have done some very creative and beautiful rocket stoves indoors. I am thinking about making a rocket stove for cooking indoors that I can remove easily in summer and use it out side during summer.

    Here is a easy rocket stove video


    here is a nice indoor one:



    Below is a video on the science of rocket stoves:




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