It’s the end that matters, you can change how you get there.
I get the feeling this winter (2020) is going to be a cold one and after the summer we have just come out of that may not be a bad thing, but we still want to be comfortable.
Quite often the answer to ‘how can I be comfortable in the winter’ is ‘let’s heat the whole house!’ Certainly we have applied that logic, by installing an open fire when we first moved in (replaced by the more efficient slow combustion cooker/heater some years back) and the Petite Godin slow combustion up the other end of the house when Angela was born.
Lots of people do similar things using reverse cycle aircon, gas or electric heating, and this certainly makes for a comfortable house to be in on cold days and nights, but it can also burn through a lot of energy and a lot of money as well. Yes, we burn wood, which is short cycle carbon, rather than fossil fuels which produces carbon dioxide originally locked away millions of years ago, but wood burners still produce greenhouse gases. So what to do?
If our goal is to remain comfortable in cold weather(without costing a bundle and screwing up the environment), we can shift how we get there by concentrating on keeping our bodies warm directly rather than heating the air around us and allowing it to then keep us warm.
We try to do this these days, using a number of techniques. We do use the wood burner at night to give us a bit of heat and to cook on, but we use clothing layers to keep us warm during the day. One idea we have found very useful is our wearable blankets as our outer layer. These are basically warm blankets which have been modified to make them…………………wearable! The detail on how to do that is accessible here but it is about applying buttons or press studs so that you can wrap the blanket around yourself and then close it up to keep you warm. We find it works very well and when teamed up with a woolly hat, warm fingerless gloves and warm socks or other footwear you can still do most inside jobs and yet remain toasty without heating up the surrounding area.
We also use a heated throw rug while we are sitting down reading, watching a movie or whatever, we sit together and with the extra bit of warmth it provides we are quite comfortable. For us it makes use of the power our system generates, but even if you are using coal fired electricity it only uses 160 watts maximum whereas an electric space heater can consume ten times this much or more.
Oddly enough, we don’t use electric blankets on our bed but use a number of other techniques to keep warm including microfleece sheets, sleeping together and stored heat from a hot water bottle, or wheat bag etc. More detail on this approach can be accessed here.
So I have found that once we have worked out our objectives, it is a case of being open to new ideas as to how we can attain them by the most efficient, least wasteful means and at a reasonable cost!
