January 24, 2010
Living in a cold house
3 Comments »This has been the winter of both getting the weatherstripping in right and working to heat less of the house.
A recent article in the New York Time looks at folks that intentionally live with no or minimal heat. One of their linkouts is to Cold House Journal, a blog journaling a Maine couple’s life in “a house with no furnace, no radiators, no thermostat”. We’re not that hardcore, but we’ve been making some choices that run counter to the houses and lifestyles in which we were raised.
Our house predates central heat by a few decades. The gas furnaces and ductwork added on manage to heat the house, but it is inefficient and expensive. The 6 fireplaces taunt us with their poor condition. The fireplaces also hint at how the house used to be heated: one or two rooms at time.
The long-term plan probably involves getting one or more of the fireplaces hooked up to some sort of stove to make heating specific rooms more attainable. Until then, we’ve been able to block off lower-use sections of the house and separate them from the heated space by putting doors back up and closing the heating vents in those spaces.
In addition, the dual-zone furnaces (relics of the house’s time as a duplex) allow us to set the downstairs temperature much lower than the upstairs where we spend more time. The downstairs has been set in the low 50s, with the back third or so not being heated at all
This next gas bill will be the first since we went to trying this. It has also been a very cold stretch. It’ll be interesting to see how the gas usage from the past month and the next month measure up.
I feel your pain. We have 2 zones also. In the winter we close off the downstairs and all the doors upstairs, leaving us a very cold hallway. We are on the “budget” plan and pay for our 5 months of heat all year long. I don’t think people know how much it cost to heat an old house. We have 8 fireplaces but can’t use any of them because of chimney damage. We have adapted to living in a cold house. We turn up the heat when we have visitors and you can always find a blanket close by. I still wouldn’t trade our house for a new energy efficient one and in the summer love that I don’t have to turn on the a/c (window units) until weeks after everyone else does.
Cool idea. When I was growing up my parents had more house than they could afford and just didn’t heat a large part of it. Interesting to see how the idea has caught on.
I feel your pain as well, in our 110 year old Victorian in southwestern Virginia. We have done lots of weatherstripping and insulating, and went with high efficiency heat pump (gas is not available in my area), but, for all that, utility rates keep raising drastically and negating our efforts. So, this year, we decided to no longer heat the second floor, and to heat the first floor at a much lower temp. Sweaters are a must, and yes, I feel the peer pressure to turn the heat up for guests as well- they all know now to dress for the season :-)
We have one chimney that passed inspection, and have a wood stove setup for it that we use occasionally (allergies prevent us from using it all of the time). I’ve been debating the ventless propane inserts for the first floor fireplaces, so we can heat each room as we need it, or to add extra heat to a single room.
This house is fantastic in handling the hot summer months- the AC was on 3 times last summer for just a few hours each time…just not so great in the winter.