I am getting old and cannot take the cold. I used to run the house around 16°C-18°C, at the moment its 18°C - 20°C Last might outside went down to -4°C.
How much am I paying for the extra 2 degrees of comfort? Well the temperature difference was around 24°C as compared with 22°C... So extra fuel burn would be about 9%.
Do I really care enough about saving 9% of my winter oil bill to shiver in the house?
Nope. F*ck it. Turn it up to 11...
I thought of something else. When its warmer outside the percentage increases of course, but when its warm outside I need less heating anyway.
+1
In weather conditions such as we are experiencing this week I have my heating 20C 24 hours a day rather than normally setting the room thermostat to 16C for 8 hours during the night. I can afford the heating and prefer comfort. It may be more expensive but its usually for only 3 weeks a year, at most.
I heat the two rooms used most during the day to 20C but have TRVs on upstairs radiators set to a lower temperature. Doors to the 20C rooms are usually closed so that the heat is more confined.
Today, I had the heating on overnight but now at midday the sky is blue and cloudless and the solar gain through my large windows means that the room thermostat had turned the CH off.
Exactly. And I just topped up the oil and have over 2000 litres in hand...at 6.5p /kWh appx
I have switched off some of the upstairs heaters completely where I dont spend time - spare bedrooms etc. Even so its not alarmingly cold - the downstairs heat bleeds up through the ceiling
Well my living room is currently at 18.7°C - target is 18.5°C - and upstairs is at 20.8°C - target is 20.0°C
And my HANDS AND FEET ARE WARM.
Slightly tangentially ... I had a shock this week when I was sorting through a wardrobe - several things had a lot of mildew on them and a leather jacket is probably ruined because of it. The reason this is relevant is that our heating system allows individual control of temperature and schedule in each room. Several of the bedrooms aren't used for months at a time so we keep the temperature in them around
16-17 degrees. Ironically, the mildew was on clothes in a couple of bedrooms that *are* used, but we tend to keep the upstairs temperatures low so these rooms don't often get above 19 degrees. Not sure what the moral of the story is, but I think a degree or two more might be in order and hang the oil cost. An alternative might be a small bar heater in each wardrobe, but that requires a new tuit and they're always max'ed out.
Ventilation
In Germany the duvets are slung out of the wide open windows once a day in sub zero conditions.
The war wet air goes out and cold dry air comes in
We have the same problem (NB used bedrooms will be worse as exhaled breath contains rather a lot of water vapour). I "solved" the wardrobe mildew problem (like you found, worse on leather, but other fabrics were affected) by putting a small dehumidifier inside the wardrobe and running it continuously. It's one of the Peltier-based ones; these are highly inefficient but do the job and are almost silent (just the gentle fan noise). It only uses 22W an hour. From October 2023 for a year it removed a total of 33 litres of water from inside the wardrobe - almost
100 ml a day. I had a humidity meter inside the wardrobe, and although the RH varied anyway with the weather, in general the dehumidifier would lower the RH from around 72% to about 65%. That seems enough to stop the mildew. To be fair, it probably needn't be used in the summer months, so that would save on the electricity bill.
What you actually mean is: "It only uses 22W".
-- For me leaving the EU has always been a fundamental if abstract question of democratic accountability: disliking a transnational government it's impossible to kick out.
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What I meant was it only uses 22Wh an hour, but that looked clumsy!
Of course, because that is (W x h / h), and the h cancel out, leaving you with W. Simple dimensional analysis.
That's what I feel like doing when I see the daily cumlitive total clock up on a smartmeter IHD.
It's supposed to have the opposite effect I'm told.
Does anyone still quote rate of acceleration as per-second per-second?
How else do you quote it?
I would in imperial. Feet per second squared as well
Why don't you just leave the wardrobe door open a bit (or a lot). Unless the RH in the rest of the house is between 65% and 72%.
Our RH in general is much lower, usually around 40%.
Cheers
Dave R
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