Keep your house cold this winter.

[123tim]

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.