Advice, please, and thanks in advance for your suggestions.
Our rental house has an old and inefficient gas-fired heater. Also, the windows are single-glazed and leaky. We try to avoid firing the heater up unless the overnight low is forecast to be in the low 40s (Farenheit) for more than three nights in a row. And, when we do use it, it’s set to 65° F.
We want to maximize the heat-retention abilities of our bed linens. So, in which order should we layer our cotton flannel sheets, thermal blanket, wool coverlet*, and microfiber comforter? (For really cold nights [below 35° F], we spread an unzipped sleeping bag over the top of the pile.) *The wool coverlet is fairly small and we lay it over the lower part of the bed, to keep our feet warm.
mattress
heated mattress pad
microfiber plush sheets [LTD limited online]
people and cat
ikea duvet cover wrapped around the double comforter [it is a thin one and a thicker one, you can use the thin one, the thick one or both snapped together in an even thicker one
heated mattress pad costs like 5 cents per night to run, and as heat rises keeps you toasty warm under a nice thick comforter. I prefer the microfiber plush sheets because I have physical issues that make me hypersensitive sometimes and when it hits regular bedsheets feel like sandpaper. Well, and i like soft and plushy =)
How you have things listed is what I would do, down to the specific position of the smallish wool thing. And I’d be sure to tuck the sides in under us once we’re in bed. I would also get my hands on whatever cashmere I could scrounge up, from eBay or thrift store or whatever you can – it can be full of moth holes or stained if you’re wearing it under the covers in the dark, right? – as you can wear it to bed and still be comfy. If you get something two sizes too big, you can even launder it along with your sheets, in the dryer and everything. Cashmere that’s abused that way gets super fluffy and lofty and soft, if also somewhat shapeless. If you’re not picky, and willing to watch and wait, you can get an oversized ugly/holey cashmere sweater on eBay for $5-ish.
Do you have anything covering your head? People used to wear nightcaps, and they’ll probably come back in style with all the energy consciousness going around now. You can be a trend setter. A warm trend setter.
My last house was heated with a woodstove. Downstairs was nice and warm, but my bedroom, upstairs could get mighty cold when the outside temperature dipped down. Best thing I bought was an electric blanket. Ten minutes before bed I would plug it in and let it warm everything up. Before that, it would take at least half an hour of shivering in a fetal position and slowly stretching out to warm up the covers. Electric blanket made everything cozy and warm when I got into bed and then I would turn it off because it was too hot to sleep under.
I get cold at night and like lots of covers. To me, you guys don’t have enough. There should be some kind of fluffy duvet in there - feathers or polyester fibre as your preference dictates (feathers were cheaper at Ikea, when I bought mine) to trap some air between the sheets and the blankets on top. Then again, maybe with each other to snuggle and share body heat, you don’t need as much?
I know this wasn’t your question, but the shrink wrap plastic for windows does an amazing job for something that costs so little and requires no skills (I seem to recall it was about $3 per window. Yeah, that’s about right).
And you definitely could use a big poofy comforter to go over all.
Yannow, depending on how broke you are, how cold you get, and how much you like scientifical type experimentating, it might be fun to spend a few bucks on one of those mylar space blankets and put it in the layers one night. I think they’re pretty noisy, so maybe not a full night, and it wouldn’t likely be a real solution, but one of those would pretty much maximize your heat retention for body heat; if you still weren’t warm enough, you’d know no number of additional covers would make the difference and you could focus on adding a heat source, like the electric pad mentioned previously or etc.
Back in our poorer student days, when we had a less energy efficient dwelling, on the coldest nights we’d put the thermal blanket as the first layer, then sheet then everything else. It trapped a lot of little body-temp air pockets against our skin (and pjs) and really helped. On warmer nights the thermal went on top of the sheet.
I’ll echo going for insulating the house. Otherwise you’re literally throwing money out of the windows. Bubblewrap is good for windows, and there are foam insulating strips you can put in doorframes. And, if you can get them, heavy velvet curtains that go to the floor.
Interesting, though the heatshrink packages are fairly inexpensive.
One thing I did with our bedroom a few years back - we had an ex roomie that got a great deal on the pale blue styrofoam panels he intended to turn some of into a kyack. He had a bunch left, so we simply filled in the bedroom windows with them, and hung some beige microfiber plush curtains in front of. Totally blacked out the bedroom, but it was toasty warm with body heat, the aerogarden, the desktop and the TV/cable box. I use an aerogarden for light, it kicks on at 5 am and off at 11 pm and keeps my SAD under control. [the way the house is designed, the heat from the woodstove is broadcast away from the end of the house with the bedrooms so they only get heated up when the rest of the house is toasty and it seeps into the bedrooms. We have tried all sorts of ways to use fans to push the air in but it really doesn’t work.]
But really, as others have agreed, heated mattress pad FTW. Heat rises =) A toasty warm bed is very comfortable in a cold bedroom.
The heatshrink plastic uses adhesive, though, which will leave marks on the wood work, which some folks want to avoid. I wish I’d thought of the bubble wrap trick back in the day. It would have saved us a lot of labor trying to get the marks off the window frames so we could get our security deposit back.
Put a canopy over the bed. You don’t have to have a tall four-poster. Just somehow rig up something to drape a king size comforter over so that there is an air pocket over you. I used to put pillows on each side of me to hold one up. If you leave the top open, you get plenty of air but are toasty warm underneath when you snuggle down.