How to live without heating - save £000s

HertsLad

From hardergamer:

As an general builder with city & guilds in construction, I used to maintain and look after second homes, holiday homes etc, with many worth up to £20 million (in 2010), and many were never lived in at all, and all most all had the heating switched off 52-54 weeks of the year...

I trust you know what you are talking about. So it should be me warning the others they could be damaging their houses by using central heating, rather than the other way round. As I said, I have never noticed any mould.

EssexHebridean

HertsLad said:

From hardergamer:

As an general builder with city & guilds in construction, I used to maintain and look after second homes, holiday homes etc, with many worth up to £20 million (in 2010), and many were never lived in at all, and all most all had the heating switched off 52-54 weeks of the year...

I trust you know what you are talking about. So it should be me warning the others they could be damaging their houses by using central heating, rather than the other way round. As I said, I have never noticed any mould.

I suspect the key to the historic houses is a very different type of construction - we were recently looking into buying a Grade 2 listed property and even that is a whole different world when it comes to maintenance, construction type, even plastering etc! Also - a house being occupied makes a huge difference. Modern houses (anything built since the 70's, realistically) are designed to be heated internally using something like Central Heating - I'd assume that new builds from 2020 onward if not earlier are being designed with heat pump heating in mind. Earlier builds in the UK are often designed with a central fire or fires in mind - again with the property we were looking at it had a big central fireplace which would have radiated heat throughout the building. 

MarzipanCrumble

Interesting.  1920s detached house, insulated cavity walls and attic but I leave CH really low - 15 degrees ish - but on if cold and/or raining a lot and not high temp outside.  I do not dry clothes etc inside - they go outside 90% of time whatever unless raining or in tumble dryer, which is poss under 10 times in a year.  Condensation on double glazed is minimal;  no mould. 

I have a wood burning stove where the chimney is central to the main area of the house and the stove is lit mostly from Nov through to april daily but usually from after midday and let to go out from about 19.00.  I think this has helped massively.

hardergamer

EssexHebridean said:

HertsLad said:

From hardergamer:

As an general builder with city & guilds in construction, I used to maintain and look after second homes, holiday homes etc, with many worth up to £20 million (in 2010), and many were never lived in at all, and all most all had the heating switched off 52-54 weeks of the year...

I trust you know what you are talking about. So it should be me warning the others they could be damaging their houses by using central heating, rather than the other way round. As I said, I have never noticed any mould.

I suspect the key to the historic houses is a very different type of construction - we were recently looking into buying a Grade 2 listed property and even that is a whole different world when it comes to maintenance, construction type, even plastering etc! Also - a house being occupied makes a huge difference. Modern houses (anything built since the 70's, realistically) are designed to be heated internally using something like Central Heating - I'd assume that new builds from 2020 onward if not earlier are being designed with heat pump heating in mind. Earlier builds in the UK are often designed with a central fire or fires in mind - again with the property we were looking at it had a big central fireplace which would have radiated heat throughout the building. 

You make a good point, as newer homes mainly built in the mid 90's onwards have very good breathability as they use modern building materials like Ferterra Thermalite or Aircrete blocks (instead of concrete) which are much more breathable, and do better with some heat to dry out with ventilation, but ventilation alone will still work, but I can't remember many homes having CH until the start of the 90s same as uPVC windows and I can't remember seeing or building any homes with CH before 86, with council homes starting to get CH around 93, and even into the 2000 most homes were built with open fireplaces/stoves still and/or Rayburn or AGA stoves which heated 2-3 radiators, and the norm was electric storage heaters on E7 until the 90s down here, with the 5-bedroom house built in 2002 my brother brought 6-7 years ago having no CH only an electric underfloor heating and an open fire place but with a wood burning stove installed.

Today Just look at any building of the last 20 years it will have roof ridge or fascia ventilation, and about the last 30+ years active fan bathroom and kitchen vents which helps remove any condensation in the air.

One of the biggest causes of mould and damp is open gas fires or older CH boilers or even cookers with an open flame or pilot light burning natural gas, as burning gas gives off both carbon dioxide and shed loads of water vapour which then will accumulate in the air and deposit on surfaces with a lower difference of temperature, but one of the biggest improvements of more modern homes is having a full damp foundation membrane (Tanking) which nearly completely stops rising damp along with the under floor outer cavity wall ventilation.

If you look up the book "The Warm Dry Home" by Pete Ward he explains all the cons of sealing up older homes with cavity wall insulation combined with too high CH temps, as this will often be causing mould and damp problems, the same as silicone injection in stone and brick walls, or read the Haynes manual "Period Property Manual: Care and repair of old houses" it talks about heat cycling causing damage, and cause dry rot, and all this wanting thermal efficiency is resulting in the destruction of many older homes.

Sorry for this long rant again, and any bad grammar or spellings as I'm dyslexic, so I write all this by transcribing.

chris_n

@hardergamer, not going to disagree with your points re ventilation etc but a couple of points where my experience (may be location based, NE England) is very different to yours.
Newer houses built from 90's onwards have less breathability and better air tightness within the heated envelope, unheated spaces (roofs etc) have the likes of Tyvek membranes to help them breathe.

All council houses close to where I grew up had gas or electric (storage with warm air) central heating from mid 70's.
All council houses close to where I grew up had gas powered wet central heating systems from mid 80's and all retrofits / revamps since have been brought to same standard.
One of the council houses I lived in built in 1965 had solid fuel powered central heating. 
Very few houses were built with open fireplaces after the 70's, there were plenty built with Rayburns etc for miners and ex miners who still got a solid fuel allowance. 
One house that I lived in (still own it) built in 1976 had one spot on one bedroom wall where mould could grow if and only if a piece of furniture was placed close to the wall. It turned out a wall tie had loads of snots on it causing a cold bridge which I found with a thermal imaging camera. 
Apart from that none of the houses I lived in had any issues with mould but all have been adequately heating and ventilated. 

EssexHebridean

Extremely different in the London area too - not least because of the Clean Air Act (1956!)  I now live in East Anglia - in a New Town which was mainly built from 1954 > late 1970’s - many of the later houses in the town weren’t even built with chimneys. Ours was built to have electric heating - elsewhere in the town it was a warm air system originally.  Contrast that with the Outer Hebrides where even most private new builds now still have fireplaces and chimneys - the local authority new builds are being given heat pumps now. Amazing how things different across the country though isn’t it! 

We are also “victims” of an experimental build here - concrete precast panels with a brick outer skin. No cavity, decent ventilation (trickle vents to all windows and we open windows when the temperature allows) but avoiding damp is a constant battle, one which we struggle to win. The flats with central heating suffer less, but aren’t entirely free of it. I’ve always assumed that the “concrete box” construction has a lot to do with it. 

chris_n

Many houses where I live now (Austria) are constructed with cast on site concrete. Even if the upper floors are built with clay blocks the basement level and all intermediate ceilings / floors are cast concrete. They have to do this because of frost heave so if the foundations need to be 2 metres deep they may as well use the foundations as living or storage space. The buildings all have 200mm or so of external insulation and these days most have heat pumps with UFH, they aren't damp (as long as the externaltanking is done properly).

hardergamer

chris_n said:

@hardergamer, not going to disagree with your points re ventilation etc but a couple of points where my experience (may be location based, NE England) is very different to yours.
Newer houses built from 90's onwards have less breathability and better air tightness within the heated envelope, unheated spaces (roofs etc) have the likes of Tyvek membranes to help them breathe.

All council houses close to where I grew up had gas or electric (storage with warm air) central heating from mid 70's.
All council houses close to where I grew up had gas powered wet central heating systems from mid 80's and all retrofits / revamps since have been brought to same standard.
One of the council houses I lived in built in 1965 had solid fuel powered central heating. 
Very few houses were built with open fireplaces after the 70's, there were plenty built with Rayburns etc for miners and ex miners who still got a solid fuel allowance. 
One house that I lived in (still own it) built in 1976 had one spot on one bedroom wall where mould could grow if and only if a piece of furniture was placed close to the wall. It turned out a wall tie had loads of snots on it causing a cold bridge which I found with a thermal imaging camera. 
Apart from that none of the houses I lived in had any issues with mould but all have been adequately heating and ventilated. 

Yes, newer homes have better air tightness, but they also have much more ventilation in the roof and under the ground floor, which lets the house breathe more.

Maybe it's because It's so much warmer down here, like I haven't had any heating on for 4 days now, and it's now 21C indoors, in fact I have a fan on to try and cool down. But I have built homes all over the UK with one big project just outside Leeds in around 1987 with half private and half council and none of them had gas CH but had electric storage heaters plus open fire places

But a quick google and I can see gas CH was not main stream until 75 with only 1 in 4 having any CH let alone gas which was 1 in 10, and gas CH only overtook electric storage heaters around 1990, and was hardly heard of until 1970. Read the links, as according to the government only 1 in 200 had gas CH in 1965

Also in many parts of Scotland like where many of my family live Stornoway Outer Hebrides a large percentage still use peat or coal for heating with very little ever having gas CH, and only now they are installing heat pumps, but mainly in council houses, even down here we still have coal trucks delivering smokeless coals like Anthracite or seasoned dry wood which is very common, with around 1 in 10 still burning them.

https://www.easiplumb.co.uk/the-history-of-central-heating-in-the-home

Stats on all CH showing 1 in 4 had it in 1970. https://www.statista.com/statistics/289137/central-heating-in-households-in-the-uk/

BBC talking about "1970 was just starting off"  but really started after 1980.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8283796.stm

markin

Max68 said:

Like anything I think it's all what you are used to.  From what I can gather Hearts Lad has been doing this for years so he is probably used to it, but its like the old stories of what it was like back in the 50s/60s winters with freezing outside toilets and ice on the windows, people didn't know any different until they eventually moved.  It's very difficult to "go back".  Many would struggle without a mobile phone now despite many of us remembering that once upon a time if you wanted a taxi you would have look up the number in a directory and put 2p in a phone box.  Would we all go back to eating food with bits of dirt in it or drink water that's brown in colour?  Would you expect the NHS to perform operations without anaesthetic?  Certainly by cutting back I appreciate that once you get used to 16c/17c you know you were probably overdoing it by basking in 22c heating and wearing shorts and a tee shirt but once you get down to 14 and lower it's too cold for me.  If the whole country did what Hearts Lad is happy to do then for me it's all going backwards.  It's 2022 not 1722 and people shouldn't be freezing in their homes.

He's hardly rejecting modern technology and going back to the 60's. It's the entire country that's rejected this thing call insulation for 40 years

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When the cold snap ended lots of people found their lofts were dripping water on the north side.
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6410359/condensation-in-loft

markin

HertsLad said:

Does this forum have a bug? When I go into a quoted section to trim it a bit, I can't get back to the section where I type my reply. On my desktop PC browser I can go into html mode as a workaround but my phone doesn't seem to offer this option. Any thoughts?

Yes very annoying bug, did it on this post and all the time on the phone, on the phone I always select 'request desktop site' and zoom in, and on many other sites too, its just easier than the annoying phone version.