We are much warmer than the rest of the UK. Down south in Cornwall, we rarely get it this cold and we've been -2 at the warmest today!!! It is a challenge to stay warm in this weather. A lot of people like me will be doing what they can to keep warm. We were advised by the central heating engineer, to have the boiler set on the lowest setting and the radiators set of the highest setting. Boiler is on 1 and the rads are on 9 and the house is 18 degrees. What warmth we have needs to stay in. If you have spare blankets, shut the curtains and then hang a blanket over the curtain rail to form another thickness to your curtain. Hang a blanket or another curtains over the doors. We've lightly nailed curtains to our glass internal doors. I'll worry about the holes and fill them with wood filler in the spring. For now, the need is warmth and not looks.
I'm upstairs working in my office and to stop the warmth being wasted, I bring a flask with me and then I don't have to keep opening the door. I also only boil the kettle once. I don't have lovely homemade blankets, but I do buy whitney blankets in the charity shop. I have one over the back of my office chair and one across my lap. I'm certainly not cold.
I've stopped up all the draughts with draught excluders. I don't have any thing as posh at the one below, I use folded old curtains or folded old towels. They stop the air flow just the same.
One thing we can afford plenty of, is homemade soup. Tonight we had the remainder of the gammon with some chips and beans, but we always have soup to defrost.
Tonight, our heating will be on for three hours and we need to make sure we keep the house warm all night. Even double glazing is not that brilliant as insulation, so you need to do a lot to stop the warmth escaping. If you don't have spare curtains, then use old cardboard to form another barrier inside. If you have a spare duvet, put that under your bottom sheets to insulate underneath your body as well as one of top.
The gas bills will go up in the new year, whilst we are paying for this quarter, so be aware of the 7% increase, which will have 20% VAT on it too, so our bills will increase by one quarter. Hence if your bill is usually £100 a quarter, it will now be £125 a quarter!!!
I'm not suggesting that anyone allows themselves to be chilly for the sake of saving money, but if you have heated your home, do what ever you can to keep it warm and yourselves warm. Finally, one room living is the answer, if like us, you're just a couple without children. We've warmed (taken the edge off!) all of the house, but we heat the one room we are in. We use our oil filled radiator, it cost us about £25 (Argos) and it really warms a room to the point of being cosy. It is very cheap to run. You can wheel it from room to room. Ours is in our living room, where we eat, read, knit and 'hunker down' in this cold weather. What is everyone else doing to keep warm without breaking the bank?
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