Preparing for Winter V

Primrose

Thick frost this morning and 15 Degrees indoors before the central heating kicked in despite double glazing, cavity wall insulation and about 10" of insulation in the loft. Goodness knows how cold it must be like in houses with no insulation!

[Deleted User]

Really good frost outside this morning even down here in the far south, and 0.2 temperature according to the weather station in the garden. He Who Knows went up and swapped to a pair of lined trousers and his balaclava for walking Cookie dog this morning, must really be cold as he has rhino hide and doesn't tend to feel cold weather!

mardatha

Lucy you'd save a fortune if you only heated the baby's room and your own bed, with an electric blanket. Much cheaper and easier to heat a bed rather than a bedroom. And I've found that no matter how much insulation a house - or a person - has, if the temp is low then you're going to be cold because your surroundings are cold. I've lived in some seriously cold houses lol and never want to again!

Lucy5781

Yes would be far more cost effective but I wanted the downstairs to stay warm as well as it takes forever to heat up after a really cold night. The toilet is off the kitchen and I'm peeing at 3am most nights and then if we're not going out, we spend most of the day in the lounge.

Laura_Elsewhere

Lucy, that does sound like you're up against it a bit!

Have you got all the cheap old-fashioned, virtually-free things in operation? My Gran lived mostly in 1920s-30s houses and was very canny with not spending money sh didn't have to - she had proper heavy curtains that were bigger than the window aperture (you can find them cheap on eBay because people change their curtains nowadays for fashion) but she also took them down in autumn and sewed in a blanket between curtain and lining to make them even heavier - check your curtain-rail can take it, but maybe try safety-pinning a blanket to one room's curtains for a few days and see if it helps, before going to the effort of sewing them in?

Also, she kept curtains closed in every room not in use. So in the mornings she'd open all the windows at once to air the bedrooms for five minutes (this is really important to void damp, esp with a baby!) and then close them, and close the curtains - exception being if the sun was streaming into that room, because that dos bring some warmth. But she'd go round at different times closing curtains as the sun moved round or it clouded over.

She had "portieres" - light chenille panels hung from a thin brass rod above every internal door, on the hall side. Wide enough to cover the whole door, long enough to trail on the floor a couple of inches. Yes, a little fiddly to open a door and then move the curtain to walk through but you get used to it surprisingly easily. We had them when I was young in our Edinburgh house and non of our friends or visitors ever had problems. Just a light panel of chenille fabric, so it was easy to move - but it stopped warmth laking out of the rooms that were heated.

I bang on endlessly to everyone about "stone pigs" - ceramic hot water bottles, a cylinder that sits on a flattened base with a screw-top filler-hole above. Pour a little boiling water in and swirl round to warm the stoneware, then tip that out and fill completely, do up the stopper, wrap a towel round it and tuck it in the bottom of your bed and so long as it stays covered by the duvet it will be actually hot, not just warm, ten hours later... It does need a bed with a foot to it so you can't just kick it out onto the floor, where it might break, or might go through the floorboards, they're hefty things

And she always said thin layers were better than great thick chunky jumpers, and some research on old-fashioned Everest-climbing kit found the same thing - I buy those very thin pure-wool jumpers from M&S men's dept on eBay for 2-3 quid and then deliberately machine-wash them and tumble-dry a bit to shrink them slightly to fit me and be a little thicker. It gives me a layer I can wear under a shirt if I want, or under another jumper or cardigan, without feeling like the Michelin Man! Same with socks, a couple of pairs of thin socks, and then a pair of chunky thick slipper-socks will be much warmer than just thick socks.

You may be doing all those things, of course! But we've forgotten, I think, a lot of the old ways like keeping curtains closed whenever possible - I think most people only think of closing curtains when they go into a room at night to use the room, drawing them for privacy purposes, by which time the heat may have been leaching out of the windows for some hours! Close them while it's still light and it helps keep the warmth in...

Primrose

On a really cold day like today I can echo the advice about keeping curtains closed during daytime unless the sun is providing a little bit of heat (apart from an elderly neighbour who always opens her front bedroom curtains every morning as a signal to her neighbours that she!s still alive and up !!

Extra light clothing layers do work, especially when sedentary and not moving around. Make a point to keep getting up every 30mins to keep the circulation moving. And keep the body extremities warm which is where you lose a lot of body heat. Wooden bobble caps and fingerless gloves are great for this! Comfort before elegance !

It was 15 degrees in our house this morning before the central heating kicked in and even with a well insulated house our ageing boiler is struggling to keep the temperature at a comfortable level.

culpepper

Merino Thermals in Aldi today. They are £17 a top or leggings. I bought some last year and they are very good .

Laura_Elsewhere

My thermal leggings com from Peacocks and were £6 a pair a couple of years back - I wear them under full skirts and am toasty as anything!

(There's a reason men in Scotland wear kilts - see when there's a really long bitterly cold spell? You just start seeing more and more men in kilts around Edinburgh, where I used to live. I had friends who wore their kilts to get to and from work, changing into suit trousers for the office day! The trapped air is FAR warmer than trousers, even trousers with leggings or tights under. Try it!)

Laura_Elsewhere

Primrose wrote: »

On a really cold day like today I can echo the advice about keeping curtains closed during daytime unless the sun is providing a little bit of heat (apart from an elderly neighbour who always opens her front bedroom curtains every morning as a signal to her neighbours that she!s still alive and up !!

Extra light clothing layers do work, especially when sedentary and not moving around. Make a point to keep getting up every 30mins to keep the circulation moving. And keep the body extremities warm which is where you lose a lot of body heat. Wooden bobble caps and fingerless gloves are great for this! Comfort before elegance !

It was 15 degrees in our house this morning before the central heating kicked in and even with a well insulated house our ageing boiler is struggling to keep the temperature at a comfortable level.

Our little flat is generally around 15-17 degrees in winter anyway, but we're used to it (and we don't have a young baby or anyone ill or very elderly!).

You're spot-on right about the light layers and the indoor hat! I've got a pretty black lace cap thing I crocheted myself, which is surprisingly warm, and am planning to crochet or knit myself others for wearing indoors that look less like a bobble-hat

I am fine when cooking or doing housework, because I'm moving about, but when sitting still for needlework or the tiny bit of online work I do, it can get chilly. I fill the stone pig to rest my feet on, and have a very light fleecy throw that I tuck round my legs, helping to keep the pig warm. I have fingerless gloves, but they actually make some needlework a bit tricky, getting in the way more than you'd think, so I'm doing myself some wrist-warmers that cover my lower forearm and wrist but stop before the base of my thumb. That should free my hands up but keep the blood supply to my hands good and hot!

Lucy5781

I used to live in a 1911 flat with much worse problems.

One big problem we have here is the lounge is open to the stairs so lots of the heat escapes up to the landing.

No issues with damp but the lounge is effectively exposed on two sides, the front and the side where we are link detached, there's a small tunnel between us and next doors lounge that gives access to our back gardens. Just doesn't help.