Why are we paying someone to heat parts of our house we aren't in?
This was one of my Dad's deep questions. Two adults, two kids and three dogs in a small house subject to Montana winters. Cold snaps could be deep and long - a week or more with highs well below 0° F ( -18° C) weren't uncommon. More impressive were the lows: -30° F (-35°C) came at least once every Winter and record lows were below -40°. Dressing for it was a necessary skill. Inside the home my Dad controlled a powerful technology - the thermostat.
When people were around during daytime the thermostat was set to 62°. The nighttime setting, from 9 PM until the first person got up at about 5:30AM, was 55° If people were out of the house the setting was 52°. As far as I could tell these were his fundamental constants. Warm clothing, sweaters, quilts (my parents cheated and had an electric blanket) made it comfortable and sometimes even too warm. There was only one thermostat and a few areas of the house were always a bit colder or warmer. The dogs found the warmest regions at dog level. They also had warm blankets that they'd drag around where needed.
Since then I've learned a bit about home heating. Some of the best information on home energy measurements comes from England. They found standard modern construction homes see seven to ten percent energy savings for each degree celsius drop between 15° and 20° C . Lowering the thermostat setting from 70° to 61° (21° to 16° C) could translate to 30 to 40% reduction in your heating bill. It could also make a serious impact in places facing severe gas shortages this coming Winter.
There are other tricks. A big key is to heat the people and not the airspace where they aren't. We had a small, partly finished family room in the basement. We were there a lot during the Winter as it was the warmest room in the house. Four people and three dogs radiated body heat along with four 150 watt lamps in the ceiling and a small electric heater (pro tip -- if you have a male dog, don't put one of these on the floor). My Dad had a tendency to drop the thermostat to nighttime levels when we were down there. Most of our books lived there and a long work bench allowed my sister and I to work on homework and hobbies. There was a TV, but it didn't get used that much. It's where we told stories.1 In the Summer the warm rugs on the floor came up and the room was a naturally cool place to escape the heat of the un-airconditioned home.
The English studies I came across note the average English home was heated to 13° C (55° F) in 1970 rising to 20° C by 2000. Our house wasn't all that different from the average English house.
There are many other tricks for saving energy - insulation, heat pumps and so on, but they won't happen in Europe before this Winter for most people. Insulation, done improperly, can be a two edged sword. Forced air heating, the most common type in the US, fills the house with heated air. Insulation keeps as much of the heat as possible inside. The problem is that often the air is trapped inside. Stale air can be unhealthy (VoCs, high CO2 levels, etc.). There's a simple technology that can help - in fact you needn't look farther than your nose. Your nose is a heat exchanger. Cold air comes in and is heated up without releasing much of your body heat when you exhale. Most industrial buildings and some homes have heat exchangers - they're required by many building codes to keep super insulated homes healthy. Something to look into if your place is heavily insulated.
Localized radiant heat allows you to circulate some air from the outside and still be comfortable - you're heating people rather than the air. You've probably noticed Scrooge's chair, in many adaptations of A Christmas Carol, has a high back curved sides. These were common in the Victorian era.. sit in front of a fireplace and focus the warmth. People have experimented with heated chairs with good results - notably work at Berkeley in the past decade.2 (They also designed and tested cooled chairs for the Summer). People who live on the Japanese island of Hokkaidō modify the short legged Japanese family tables by putting a blanket over them and a small heater underneath. I've used one of these visiting a couple from Sapporo when they were living in NY and was amazed how well it worked in their otherwise chilly house. Teenagers like them for other reasons when their parents aren't home.
In short there are many paths to clever - no silver bullets, but a lot of silver buckshot. Twenty or thirty percent conversation levels are quite realistic for many people. I won't mention adventures in an unheated 15 foot trailer with three dogs at -25°F (my mother thought colder temperatures were dangerous)
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1 Nordic families seemed to tell a lot of stories. Our heritage isn't Nordic, but many of our neighbors were and some of that rubbed off on us.
2 Here's an example and test of a heated/cooled chair. You could make one of these.. I haven't seen anything commercial.
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