Last year, first or second week of December, I got a call from the natural gas company; we have electric everything else, but gas heat. They wanted to know when a good time would be to send a worker out to check the connections and meter system for our apartment. You see, they hadn’t registered any use yet, so there definitely had to be something wrong with it. The nice lady was pretty well bewildered when I told her we hadn’t turned the heat on yet, and spent the next couple of minutes trying to figure out how that was possible and if I wasn’t really trying to pull one over on the gas company. (Oh… so you must be in an apartment with no external walls or windows? etc.)
So, ah, no, we didn’t turn the heat on last night when it briefly got into the 30s and flurried a bit.
Yup… oven for dinner, heat given off by the computers, by the TV, so on and so forth raises the temp 4-5 degrees on its own in the 2-3 hours after we get home from work. That’s another big part of it.
Me exactly too. I loathe hot muggy weather and crank the bejesus out of the AC in the summer.
I’ve been leaving the thermostat set at 50 so far…I’ll turn up in the morning so it’s not really chilly when I get out of the shower, then turn it back down. When Michigan winter really hits, I keep it about 60 in here.
The smallest dog is not a fan of cool temperatures, but she gets on my bed and makes a nest in the quilt.
Pipes - I just bought this house last summer, and the pipes did freeze once when in was extremely cold, and windy. I’d insulated them all, but where it comes from the main into the house there’s also a crawl space opening, which I’d neglected to cover and insulate. Sustained Arctic blasts into my crawl space overnight froze the pipes. Luckily no burst pipes and I put a small heater under there to thaw them out, no harm done.
I live in an apartment building with utilities included, so it doesn’t matter how high I turn up the heat. The heat and A/C are controlled by management, but once they’re turned on we can control the temperature in our apartments. They turned the building-wide A/C off a couple of weeks ago and the heat just went on today, since it’s going into the 30s this weekend. I have it at 75 right now. They get very touchy about adequate heating because the county requires landlords to have means available for the interior temperature to be at least 68 degrees at all times, so they are very responsive to climate control issues. I called in the very early morning to report a problem once and maintenance showed up within 15 minutes.
Our heat is on since last week–it’s currently set to about 66, although I turn it down to around 60 at night. We’re getting snow (in October!) and the temps are supposed to continue to drop throughout the day. Right now, I’m wearing yoga pants, socks with slippers, a tee-shirt with a fleece. If I drag out the lap blanket (which I’d really like to do), every single cat in the house (four) will be in my lap, jockeying for a place within seconds. Usually I don’t mind, but it means I don’t have room for my laptop. (They are mostly very fat cats.)
Just turned it on for the first time, mostly in a vain attempt to get the cat off my lap.
When I turned it on, it was 51 degrees according to the thermostat and somewhere in the mid 40’s according to the indoor thermometer near my couch.
Part of my motivation for turning it on was that I wanted to make sure it was still working well – be sort of upsetting to turn it on for the first time when it’s actually cold out and find out it was dead.
At some point last night, my wife shut the window in our bedroom. I looked at my phone when I woke up and saw it was 30 degrees outside, so I figured that was why…Nope, it was because some kids were being loud outside.
So yeah, I threw on some sweatpants to watch football this afternoon instead of shorts. Heat’s still off, though.
Hah! Heat? As** a/k** so tersely put it, “what’s that?” (That is you who traded me that quite delightful home-brewed dark beer for homemade salsa, is it not, a/k?)
We have a wood stove (2 actually), and just fire up a quick one when it gets nippy, but not frigid. When the deep of winter sets in, we just keep a rolling fire going most of the time. I can send the kids out for sticks in the woods to cover those early season types of heat needs. If you’re using oil or electric or gas, I completely understand not cranking up the thermostat until absolutely necessary (we have oil backup). Pile on the clothes and blankets!
Side note: I’m 30 minutes from Canada, and our friends and relations to the south (MA, CT, NY, etc.) are getting pounded with an early season 12" dumper of a snowstorm just now. Going to miss us, thankfully.
