I live by MYSELF and I am a heat nazi, and I use an electric blanket. You can spend as little or as much as you want on the blanket. I have a crappy second-hand throw that I use. You really can’t beat it.
You turn it on a few mins before bedtime and hop into a warm bed. If you wake up in the night sweating, you turn it off. Or if you get toasty by the time you’re nodding off, turn it off and you’ll stay warm.
I am also an electricity nazi (again, with myself) and I didn’t notice any spike in electricity bills over the winter.
Sunbeam is the company for primo electric blankets (and mattress pads!)
Dude, it’s not for nostalgic purposes. That’s its purpose, i don’t feel like I should have to go out and buy one when I have a perfectly good instrument of heating 3 feet away from me. I do believe that space heaters are actually barred in our lease anyway (though it may be only specific ones) but i will double check.
I don’t want the whole house heated at night guys, that would be a horrible waste. I just want to control the temp in my own room between the hours of 8pm-6am. That way she and 3rd flatmate can control theirs how they like as well.
I do take offence that I am “throwing anemia around to get my way”. I’ve not done that at all, just trying to demonstrate one of the reasons why I do get cold.
Ah, I apologize Mr Jim…put that way, you do have the more reasonable arguement. It was probably my own roommate heating issues that triggered such a violent response.
Last fall, my husband, EVERY TIME he was at home, cranked up the heat. I was (and still am) having serious hotflashes at the time (damned menopause). I had enough of it being so damned hot and uncomfortable, that I called the gas company and had them come and turn off our line.
Well.
That didn’t go over too well at all, at the time…BUT, hubby made do, and made do perfectly well, I might add…with a space heater that he could move from room to room AND by buying himself an electric blanket.
He survived.
I was happy and not too horribily hot.
I giggled like a madwoman every time we got our gas bill, because it was so low. The electric bill didn’t raise very much, even though he used the electric heater and electric blanket. We live in west central Indiana, so it can get rather cold here during the winter, but we compromised and it worked quite well!
The space heaters are rather safe, I think. The one my husband bought will shut down if it is tipped over. I think they all do, actually. Isn’t that a rule with them or something?
You just have to be aware of where you put it and be careful with it when it is on.
Space heaters and electric blankets can be dangerous, if left unattended. Quite frankly, I’d save and invest good money in a heavy down filled quilt. My uncle brought back one from Poland for my grandmother and that thing is WARM.
Pile on lots and lots of blankets and wear warm jammies and you should be fine.
That lasts… what, five minutes max? Keeping the whole house warm for one 5-minute urination is absurd, too.
I would bitch about it too. Honestly, it’s a dreadful and ridiculous waste to leave the heating on when you don’t need it. Think of how much CO[sub]2[/sub] emission you could save, whatever the financial costs.
My mother’s flat is the tenth in a ten-floor house. The ground floor is stores, then first floor is offices, the rest is flats. Because the central heating has to come up aaaaaaaaaaall the way from the basement, Mom’s flat starts getting warm about 1hr after the heating has switched on and of course never gets as warm as others.
Just an example: a couple years back, one of the 4th floor neighbors asked me had we been cold that winter, I said no. He turned to the other neighbor he’d been talking to and said “see, if they aren’t cold, we’re overheating, which explains why I’m too warm”. “Heyhey, waitaminute… my idea of ‘not cold’ is I’m sleeping with three thick woolen blankets and two pairs of socks. It’s not walking around in my underwear!” “Oh… but… that’s cold!” I taught his son a few weeks later how to graduate each individual heater: now “his” home office’s heater is off all winter and he only walks in his underwear in the rest of the house
Maybe you can keep the heaters on all night, but without setting them at their highest.
Isn’t that the point though? they can’t. We don’t know what housemate 3 wants, but housemate 2 wants it not to be on all night, but to be on for an hour before she wakes up. If the entire system has to be on manual to accommodate your turning on of your radiator, then housemate 2 woule have to set the alarm an hour beofre she wanted to get up, nip out of bed to put her radiator on then try to get back to sleep for that last hour.
You both seem to have conflicting requirements, and no one has the right to unilaterally decide, so you’re just going to have to try talking again.
Ohhhh… don’t do that. If you do that, you will be held responsible for any future difference between a notional current level of cost and whatever it says on the bill; you’re essentially offering to cap your roomies power bills, and people with capped bills don’t bother to regulate their use.
Which suggests an interesting compromise. Your plan, Mr Jim, is problematic only because it’s denying her the right to control her heat. Is it possible to turn all the radiators on from a central location? If so, it would be fair for turning them on in the morning to be your responsibility: you could get out of bed and manually turn them all back on an hour before she has to get up. Problem solved!
Are modern electric heaters plugged into a grounded outlet and free of debris really all that dangerous?
What Kalhoun said. This is asinine. By insisting on keeping the the centrally controlled heat on because you don’t want to use any one of a number of perfectly acceptable alternatives, for what amounts to aesthetic reasons, is unreasonable.
Too much heat at night is maddening to try to sleep with , and is much more difficult to moderate than too little, given your practical alternatives. You’re being a controlling and unreasonable by insisting that the central room radiator is the only acceptable alternative. It’s not.
First off, I suggest that 3rd flatmate needs to move out to get away from her two passive-aggressive roomates.
Second, agree to 3rd flatmate’s suggestion. Try it, and see how it goes. And don’t talk about "what if"s:
Yeah, like you did right there. Agree to a compromise, and stop arguing so that it’s obviously not really a compromise, because you’re planning on doing what you want to, anyway.
Back in Band Camp, I could swear that I read a Penthouse Forum starting with those very words “I live in a 2nd floor flat with 2 other girls. We each have our own rooms. It’s starting to get a bit cool in the evenings and being that this is our first winter as a threesome…”
(Whatever you do, say ‘no’ to the Cricket bat…! :eek: )
I have to side with your roomate for one reason. If you go off the timer, it is impossible for her to turn the heat off in her room at night, then back on before she gets up. If you go on the timer, you have options that can keep your room warm all night. It’s not about one person’s rights trumping another’s, but coming to a solution where everyone can be comfortable.
Even if your roomies turn off their radiators, the boiler still has to run to keep your radiator going, and the heat in the common rooms will have to stay on. That costs money, it’s not a stretch to think that using the timer will save you enough (even at 1/3rd of the bill) to pay for a small heater or electric blanket.
I think the idea of leaving the heat on all night is absolutely ridiculous. When you don’t need the heat, you turn it off. You hardly need it when you’re asleep. And for me at least, being in a really warm room when I’m trying to sleep is incredibly uncomfortable. If someone I was living with insisted on leaving the heat up all night, I’d go nuts, particularly since there are a lot more ways to keep warm at night than to keep cool.
Your options here are setting the timer so that the heat doesn’t go too low - find a compromise temperature - or else getting an electric blanket. And frankly, I suggest you learn a little bit about how to get along with other people, since it sure sounds like you’re not looking at all for mutually-agreeable solutions. Inventing a medical excuse for why it has to be done your way is really a lame thing to do.
Just out of interest where did you get the idea that anaemia has anything at all to do with “feeling cold”? I have never seen this mentioned as a symptom of any form of anaemia other than a precipitous loss of blood volume.
If you’re not into a space heater, you can look into a convection based panel heater. They are rare (you won’t find them at home depot, you have to look online), but cool to the touch and much safer than a spacer heater that can get tipped over very easily. Or an electric blanket and heated matress pad.
I know it sucks to lose this argument because of the way your roommate tends to make her wishes into orders, but I think, really, this time you need to back down. If you need a room nice and toasty in order to sleep, heating 2 or 3 other rooms to accomplish it is wasteful and inconsiderate, being as how (for me, at least) sleeping while overly warm is decidedly uncomfortable.
I get really cold at night. I mean really cold. I’m a very light sleeper and if my body temperature drops at all I will wake up and it takes forever to get back to sleep and I feel shitty all day. And I think you’re being unreasonable.
The cold person can always make allowances: extra blankets and clothing layers (what I do) and/or an electric blanket (far less of a fire hazard than a space heater, which as some people have said can be dangerous). Not so easy for the hot person to cool down. It’s not right to make two other people alter their heating regimen just so you’re nice and toasty. And don’t use anemia as an excuse, that is lame. You’re the one with the odd temperature request, so you have to come up with your own individual solution instead of bending others to your will. I always have.
Besides, it IS expensive to keep the heater on all night. Get yourself an energy saving blanket or some very thick clothes made out of natural fibers and stop whining.
The thing with radiators for heat is, at least in all the places I’ve lived, they’re either on or off. There’s no “turn the heat down”, it’s “turn some of the radiators in the place off and open the doors to let the heat equalize, or open a window”. True, the valves have a lot of turn in them, but every landlord I’ve ever had has been adamant that they have to be all the way on or all the way off - they tend to do nasty things if left in the middle (and, indeed, my husband didn’t believe this and we blew three…thingies…last winter, according to the repair guy, because the knobs were somewhere in the middle position instead of all on or all off.) I can definitely report that, safety aside, there is no difference at all in the amount of heat put off by a radiator with the knob turned mostly to the left or mostly to the right.
So, unless everyone wants to keep their bedroom doors open, there’s not really an option of trying low heat at night - it’s heat or no heat. No heat is easy to overcome with other methods, some of which have been suggested: electric blankets, space heaters, down comforters. To that, I’d add heavy socks and a sleeping cap. Yep, sounds old-fashioned and won’t get you laid, but I’ve worn a hat when sleeping in a tent at below-freezing temps and been just fine under two regular household blankets (I hate sleeping bags).
Compare that to too hot. What can you do about that? Run a fan, of course. Sleep naked. Wet your sheets with water. Install a window air conditioner in January.
Eh, I’m thinking your problem is easier to solve if you look at it clearly.
Stop making this a power struggle. Stop making it about making her wrong and you right. Do what you need to do to be comfortable in your own room without affecting the other rooms.
