It’s freezing… how often do you turn your heating on?

[lizziecupcakes]

Hi all
Since this is my first house (3 bed, edwardian, semi-detached, with at least 350mm loft insulation, but still draughty from gaps between the ground floor suspended floorboards), I’m just wondering what people are doing regarding their heating?

In Oct, we barely used except for late evening if we were going to shower, buttt we over used the gas fireplace because we felt cosy in there. The heating (gas) bill was £57.

Come November, we put in on once in the morning and once in the evening for about 45 mins each), and in between we used hot water bottles lol. The heating (gas) bill was about £70 for the month (we have since only used the gas fireplace when my mum).

December was pretty much the same as November and by the first week if December we had got all the loft insulation in. But, we used our electric oil heater a bit more to warm the one bedroom up a bit quicker during those colder sub-zero days. Electric heaters are expensive to use, I’ve learnt! Our December bill for the heating (gas) was £74.

Now, in these very cold minus temperatures in January we are using the thermostat to kick off the heating when it needs to, but it seems to be on pretty much a lot of the day (we turn it off at night or if we are not in the house). The thermostat is set to 15 degrees (it’s downstairs) - this feels warm enough for us downstairs since we are all layered up and also because the upstairs gets much warmer to 18-19 degrees and would otherwise get to warm (I can’t sleep when it’s too warm). I’m dreading the January bill!


What is your heating use like atm?

Thank you

 

[a twig]

Ours is on every day, 2 hours in the morning, hour at mid day and then 5 hours in the evening, set to 18’C.

We have the evohome smart system so only the rooms we need are heated at those times (although the bathrooms are set to fully come on whenever anything else is on to help dry towels etc)

If the outside temp gets below 5’C then we light the wood burner as well.

Our monthly gas costs are pretty similar to yours (£60-£70)

 

[DaveG]

You’ve read my mind. Not been on here much of late but this recent cold snap is costing me an arm and a leg.
Compared to some on here I guess my heating habits may seem quite frivolous but for us, coming from our previous house where we’d keep things much warmer (around 21c all day) it already feels like we’re compromising.

Now in our new place we keep the temp at 18.5 all day. Both me and my wife work from home and sat at a laptop that temperature still means being in a jumper and slippers. If I’m up and about doing DIY 18.5 can suddenly feel like it’s 30 degrees!

At night I’ve been knocking the thermostat down to 17.5. Part of my reasoning for keeping temperatures fairly consistent is I’ve read that old stone houses don’t like big temperature swings and as some of you may know from my other posts I am on a mission to fight damp and dry this house out. Coincidentally, humidity levels are far, far better. I’m down to 40% RH at 18.5c in most places now but I’m not sure how quickly I’ll see things go up to high 60s again once the milder damper weather returns again. We will see.

Anyway, to currently maintain this lifestyle in my 5 bed detached house with our bedroom being in the loft space, I’m averaging between £10 and £14 PER DAY

 

[CliffordPope]

Total annual heating bill 5 tipper loads of logs £1500. This year it will be be supplemented by a lot of fallen ash trees from last autumn. The rayburn is now lit every day as soon as I get up. It also supplies hot water for baths etc and does all the cooking. Cooking during the rest of the year is by gas stove - 2 large gas cylinders at £90 each.
"The house" is largely unheated, apart from the kitchen, which is nice and hot, and the chill taken off the main sitting room and a bit of the ground floor by radiators. Occasionally we let the stove go out after cooking and light the fire in the main sitting room for a cosy evening.

 

[Janela]

It is believed now that it is better to leave the heating on all the time at a (pehaps) lower temperature, not only for the house but for energy efficiency .
If you turn your heating off at night and the temperature drops more than few degrees the extra effort to the boiler in the morning will use a lot more fuel than you have saved by turning it off.
It is recommended to not exceed 2 or 3 degrees differences.

Like Dave we have lowered our house temperatures for financial and eco reasons and you do get used to it. I now find 15C rather warm! which means I swelter in a lot of other peoples houses

My husband has a little heated pad for his home office chair as he too finds the difference sitting still.

We leave the heating low and light the fires to boost the temperature in the rooms we are using through the day. We have a small gas stove in the kitchen for first thing in the morning, at midday we light the fire in the dining room but let it die down late afternoon and then light the fire in the drawing room in the evening. I love the open fires.

Lizzie do you have any heating on upstairs? like you I like a cold bedroom so we only heat the bathroom and keep the door shut (actually didn't even run the pipes to put radiators in the bedroom) In our last house we had a curtain across the bottom of the stairs to stop too much heat going up as we couldn't shut off the living rooms.

 

[aockenden]

Yeah we don’t even have a proper central heating system yet, so all we have are two big electric rads (one up, one down) plus our back boiler woodburner which runs 3 rads upstairs. I was planning to have a proper central heating system installed before this winter, so I didn’t stock up on wood last year to allow drying time, but then I got made redundant in August and I still haven’t found anything new.

This means we are burning terribly inefficient unseasoned wood and running big expensive electric rads to make up the difference. Just the electric is probably 200 per month. With the wood, another 50 at least. Miserable.

 

[Janela]

oh that's infuriating aockenden, it tends to smoke too doesn't it.

 

[paulc]

It is believed now that it is better to leave the heating on all the time at a (perhaps) lower temperature, not only for the house but for energy efficiency .
If you turn your heating off at night and the temperature drops more than few degrees the extra effort to the boiler in the morning will use a lot more fuel than you have saved by turning it off.
It is recommended to not exceed 2 or 3 degrees differences.

I have a programmable thermostat and have the night time set to 16°C. 18°C during the daytime, and 19°C in an evening. December cost me £40 for 500kWh of gas. I had been experimenting with low flow temperatures to see if the existing system would work with a heat pump and also how it affected boiler efficiency - Around 96% efficiency, but warm up times increased. But the system did heat the place with a 45°C flow temperature, although I would benefit from a couple of larger radiators.
With subzero temperatures outside, I've turned the flow temperature up to 60°C (sod efficiency), and lit the stove first thing this morning. The stove will help to keep gas consumption down and get the lounge nice and toasty.

@lizziecupcakes - It is well worth fitting a programmable thermostat (if you don't already have one). It could save up to 15% in gas, although the real saving is likely around 5%. If your boiler is a relatively new condensing one, also worth having larger radiators all round so that you can take advantage of lower flow temperatures. When I replumbed my heating system, I oversized most of the radiators by about 50% with an eye on installing a heat pump at some point in the future (pipework has also been sized with that in mind).

 

[DaveG]

Miserable describes it well aockenden!
With the thermostat placed in the coolest room downstairs, maintaining 18.5c there still means we are lucky to reach 17c in our attic room.
As it’s a bedroom we mostly don’t mind but the en-suite is an icebox, not helped by the fact the radiator in there stops working all the time. I think it’s the highest point in the heating system and air gets pushed there. I bled it a few days ago after getting a few rads replaced/modernised and got it working but it’s back to not working again now.
Everywhere you look in these houses you see heat/money escaping. Single pane, draughty sash windows, gaps around doors, redundant cat flaps from the previous owner, poor or no insulation in walls and ceilings.
The attic especially leaks heat so fast, particularly if there’s a strong breeze. It went as low as 13.6 up there while the thermostat downstairs was still at 18.5 the other week when we had that storm Darragh or whatever it was called.
There are of course ways to solve all these problems but it’s trying to tackle all the jobs in order of what will cost the least and make the most difference.
Unfortunately for the most part, apart from the odd bit of draught excluder, all of these jobs are going to be expensive and the payback will take years from a heating perspective.
Looking to get one half of the slate roof redone this year and will take the opportunity to add sarking boards and replace the three 30 year old draughty velux windows so hope that will be a noticeable difference next winter but still a very small difference on the grand scheme of things. Especially as the other half of the roof will still be as is.

 

[DaveG]

I have a programmable thermostat and have the night time set to 16°C. 18°C during the daytime, and 19°C in an evening. December cost me £40 for 500kWh of gas. I had been experimenting with low flow temperatures to see if the existing system would work with a heat pump and also how it affected boiler efficiency - Around 96% efficiency, but warm up times increased. But the system did heat the place with a 45°C flow temperature, although I would benefit from a couple of larger radiators.
With subzero temperatures outside, I've turned the flow temperature up to 60°C (sod efficiency), and lit the stove first thing this morning. The stove will help to keep gas consumption down and get the lounge nice and toasty.

@lizziecupcakes - It is well worth fitting a programmable thermostat (if you don't already have one). It could save up to 15% in gas, although the real saving is likely around 5%. If your boiler is a relatively new condensing one, also worth having larger radiators all round so that you can take advantage of lower flow temperatures. When I replumbed my heating system, I oversized most of the radiators by about 50% with an eye on installing a heat pump at some point in the future (pipework has also been sized with that in mind).

That sounds super efficient Paul.
Our last place I got kitted out with underfloor through the whole ground floor and had tiles over the lot. Sounds cold but it was heavenly. Flow temp 27c, air temperature 21c all of downstairs and upstairs all 16c. The rads upstairs hardly ever had to come on with the heat from downstairs radiating up there.
Then I moved to this old place
But it is charming so all can be forgiven. At least during first year of ownership (honeymoon period) anyway!
Ask me again in 2 winters time!

 

[Glenn586]

We have UFH throughout, even in the carpeted bedrooms. We are keeping a kitchen, a dining room, a downstairs WC, three bedrooms and two bathrooms at 20C. We let this slip to 18C from midnight to 7am. 18C seems to be the tipping point as to where the end of my nose starts to feel cold which i'm not keen on. All other rooms are set to not drop below 12C. At current temperatures this adds up to around £450 in lpg per month. On top of that the living room log burner is on from 8pm to 12pm every evening at almost no cost because as soon as I hear a tree has fallen within a mile of our house i'm all over it.

 

[Zebra]

Reading all your posts I don't feel so unusually stingy now.
The thermostat is set to 15 during the day and off at night. If I'm feeling particularly frugal though I'll switch it off altogether, though I am interested to read your posts above about the downside of temperature variation, or about maintaining a lower flow temperature.
If I'm WFH I use a hot water bottle or heated pad. In the evenings I light the wood burner.
My gas and electricity combined cost £70 last month (split roughly equally) though I'm not using the cheapest supplier as it's an ethical one....

 

[aockenden]

oh that's infuriating aockenden, it tends to smoke too doesn't it.

Yes indeed.

 

[aockenden]

Yeah we don’t even have a proper central heating system yet, so all we have are two big electric rads (one up, one down) plus our back boiler woodburner which runs 3 rads upstairs. I was planning to have a proper central heating system installed before this winter, so I didn’t stock up on wood last year to allow drying time, but then I got made redundant in August and I still haven’t found anything new.

This means we are burning terribly inefficient unseasoned wood and running big expensive electric rads to make up the difference. Just the electric is probably 200 per month. With the wood, another 50 at least. Miserable.

Although I must also add, I am absolutely LOVING these relative humidities! We’re down in the mid 40’s most of the time these days without any dehumidifier use at all. That’s the silver lining.

 

[Janela]

Reading all your posts I don't feel so unusually stingy now.
The thermostat is set to 15 during the day and off at night. If I'm feeling particularly frugal though I'll switch it off altogether,

I have always kept ours a s low as possible - more like 12 but since discovering this forum and following a couple of links I got the impression that it is bad for the fabric of the house to be below 15°C. So upped it to 15°C, at which temp, after years of no heating and a bedroom with just tiles above us, I am down to shirtsleeves. So am questioning the logic of upping the thermostat?

 

[Janela]

I had been experimenting with low flow temperatures ............. how it affected boiler efficiency - Around 96% efficiency, but warm up times increased. But the system did heat the place with a 45°C flow temperature, although I would benefit from a couple of larger radiators.

Can you explain about the low flow temperature bit I am not aware of this and we have very few radiators.

 

[TudorCottage]

Electric is the biggest drain on our resources. Electric Underfloor heating being the chief culprit , which is why it only gets turned on in really cold weather. I added a radiator downstairs to take the edge off autumn and mild winter days.

Gas central heating upstairs keeps that nice and toasty without the need to raid the Bank of England’s Gold reserves to pay for it.

What has helped is switching to a nighttime tariff. All major appliances set to a timer to run at night. Including my electric vehicle which saves me approximately £75 a week compared to my old diesel, so it’s swings and roundabouts.

 

[DaveG]

15 degrees? 12 degrees? You lot are hardcore fair play
Are you all cold shower people too “because it’s invigorating and a great way to start your day”??

 

[Janela]

Are you all cold shower people too “because it’s invigorating and a great way to start your day”??

ooooh nooooooo, we have an electric towel rail in the bathroom on a timer to boost the temp a bit and a lovely hot shower - only problem is getting out brrrrrrr
and I didn't used to have the heating that low in our previous house but when we moved here there wasn't any heating at all so we sort of got used to the cold. I do like jumpers though!

 

[noj]

Central heating is on for about 90 minutes in the morning, set to 18, does not always get there. Wood burner in the evening (or mid-afternoon if temp has dropped to 14 or below). If it's really cold then I close the door to the stairs until 10ish so the burner can make downstairs comfortable.

If partner is WFH then she runs an electric heater in the study for around 12 hours, maybe five days a week (she tends to work weekends too!). It feels like a sauna in there to me but only costs a few pounds - actually much less than bus/train/tube to the office and back or CH for the whole cottage.

Total energy cost last year was under £1300 plus lots of free firewood.