Review: Phase One of using less energy for heating

So last month my plans for lowering our energy usage for heating got the proverbial kick-in-the-butt when I got our gas bill for December which was, um, higher than I care to discuss. I have now implemented Phase One:

And here's a redux of the current changes:

1. The kitty door:



Yup, there it is. This is working out great, for several reasons, some planned on, and some surprising and neat. I installed the door with the goal of keeping the ZOMG cold air in our "sunroom" (HA!) out in the sunroom, while also keeping the kitty water, food, and litter out there. SUCCESS! Calvin the Cat has adjusted well to his door (once he got past this weird phase where he thought he had to get his paw under the door and lift it up over his head; but then, Calvin's not the brightest bulb on the tree). The door itself was not particularly difficult to install, and my DIY skill level of "Hm, I'm pretty sure this is the direction the jigsaw goes" was sufficient, and even still, after I discovered that the jigsaw's guide had busted and I was gonna have to do this freehand.

There are also two "surprising and neat" features that this little door has confered. One is that, though not visible in the picture above, to the immediate right of this door (at a 90* angle to it) is the door to the pantry. Often, both of these doors would end up open at the same time. I don't care how skinny you are (and I'm not), it was a pain to get through. And it was hopeless if you had anything in your arms (e.g., groceries, laundry, etc.). Now at least one of the doors stays closed regularly, which really helps keep that space passable. The second "hey neat!" feature is the psychological affect it's having. You see, what happens is that you come in from outside (we have a detached garage where our car, moped & bikes reside) into the sunroom, which is cold, but not nearly so cold as it is outside. And you think "Ah, warmth! I'm glad to be inside!" But then, glory of glories, you go through the door into the kitchen and it's really warm! Sure, maybe that's only 60*F, but compared to the sunroom, it's a sauna. And so the interior of our house feels even warmer still. *geek*

2. The Curtain Barriers:


There they are--these are the curtains that block off the rest of the house. Oddly enough, when these photos are side-by-side (with the white curtain on the left), it looks a surprising amount like what you see when you walk through our front door. Anyway, these curtains are designed to block heat into the other side of our house, where our family room, dining room and kitchen are. These curtains are all GoodWill finds--the one on the left is two twin-sized sheets, and the one on the right is a Queen sized comforter that I sewed some scrap fabric onto to put it onto a curtain rod. Is it working? HECK YES IT IS. It is actually startling how well this works. We've shut the vents in the rest of the house, and only keep open the ones on the living side of our house. It is remarkably warmer. In fact, I've even turned down the heat again (to 60*F), and it still feels warmer now than it did before. I may turn it down yet again. So far so good.

3. The Kotatsu:

Okay, here's the one disappointment in my current experiment, and it was the one I was sort of looking forward to the most. The kotatsu is in the living room, which is in the shut-off section of the house, but it is the room we hold our weekly roleplaying game in, so I wanted a way to warm it up a bit for everyone. But the kotatsu just doesn't work that well. I currently have three different guesses for why that is:

1. The blanket sucks. Even on high, it just doesn't feel very warm, and I'm talking even with both hands pressed on either side of the electric coils. Now, maybe it's really not supposed to get that hot--it's not an electric heating pad after all--but still.... maybe it's just not a good blanket. It's a Biddeford? Anyone?

2. It's not big enough. If I'd gotten a queen or king (correction: if I could've afforded a queen or a king) it would go over the laps of the people sitting next to the table, and maybe all would be well.

3. We're not Japanese. In Japan, people sit on the floor around the table itself rather than on couches next to the table. Perhaps this is the key difference. Sadly, I don't see our gamers starting to sit on the ground for the sake of warmth--they seem more content to stay on the couches in coats.

So, the overall verdict? A success. Even though the kotatsu isn't all that I'd hoped for, overall this strategy is working well. And for our weekly game, for the time being, I can just open the heating vents in the morning and at least bring those rooms up to 60*F once a week.

The next step will probably be getting some kind of a space heater. This will allow us to drop the gas-forced-air heat even more, and also we can take the space heater into the living room for our weekly game (and, possibly, for a new fiber-arts group that seems to be forming at my house, through very little of my own intervention). But, as usual, I'm happy to take suggestions!

Um, George, do we have a plan for getting out of this?

"Sure we got a plan, boys. *giggle* They ain't never seen ord'nance like this before!"

Sorry, I've been lapsing into and out of Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? for days now. This is the line that went ringing through my head, though, as I read over our gas bill for December. Despite my previous post, and our varied efforts to reduce our heating energy consumption, our bill was over $200 (ouch). So now the stakes have been raised. And no, I'm not currently planning on blowing anything up (despite my mention of "ord'nance" above).

Why is our bill so high? As far as I can see, there are two basic reasons. The first is that we have 10' high ceilings. Now, these ceilings save our butts in the summer--we didn't turn on our A/C at all last year (well, we did once, but that's a long story best saved for later). But our salvation in the summer is our damnation in the winter--all our heat rises above our heads. The second reason for the high bills is that it's fricking cold outside.

So now I will embark upon Stage One Preparations, as per the schematic below:

Okay, you may need to click on it to see it better--sorry. The relevant changes are in red. First, notice the barriers between the left (East) side of our house and the right (West) side of our house. We spend almost all of our time on the West side of the house, so why not make it official? I will be constructing some kind of blanket or multi-layered-sheet barrier to put up in these two locations to keep the heat in the West side of our house. I'd like whatever we use to be multi-layered, but I'm not wanting to break the bank here, either, and the one to go between the family room and living room will need to be king sized, I think. One option I've been kicking around is picking up some used king-sized sheets from Goodwill and sewing them together with some cheap batting in between them--sort of a poor woman's quilt, as it were. We'll see what I can scare up.

Moving right along, we have the Kotatsu! This will be in the living room. It will be for the express purpose of our weekly roleplaying game, which is held in that room, and for the somewhat regular "no, I really need to be in a different room from y'all now" moments. The coffee table that is currently there is a glass-topped model, so I will be putting an electric blanket on the table and then topping it with the glass. The gamers, who pretty much sit right around the table, can stay toasty-warm!

Third, I will be installing a kitty door in the door between our sunroom and our kitchen. Why? Because despite what the room is called, there is no significant sense in which the sunroom is, in fact, a sunroom. It might be more aptly described as a "cold room" or maybe an "ice box". At any rate, it's fricken' freezing in there, but it's also where Calvin the Cat's food, water, and litter are (and it's where they'll stay). Being able to keep this room even nominally closed off from the rest of the house will do wonders for our heating bill, and it will have the added bonus that installing the kitty door means I'll finally have to learn to use my jigsaw.

So there you have it. Please note that these are our Stage One operations. We don't actually have a Stage Two yet, but it will probably involve a space heater or two (and thanks to Anne for posting that website about kerosene heaters! Okay, yeah, the guy who wrote it is a bit of a zombies-are-coming nutjob, but the advice on heaters seems sound.) And, as usual, suggestions are welcome.

(BTW, we did have an energy audit done last year, and he found the house to be quite tight, and very well insulated, so working on those points will probably be shelved for later.)

It's cold in here!

One of the most basic things my family has already started working on is adjusting to the idea that houses don't have to be 68*F in the summer and 72*F in the winter. In fact, if you look at it like that, it's a bizarre luxury that we've come to expect as a birthright. But humans have survived for a good long time in a huge variety of temperatures, and there's no reason we can't go back to it.

We are starting slowly at this. Right now, our main actions have been:

1. lower the thermostat in our house to 60*F
   
2. learn how to dress in fricking layers in our house (it's really not that hard)
3. don't turn on the A/C during the summer
4. perform the summertime "dance of the windows"--more on this when summertime rolls around
   

It is wintertime where we are right now. We don't have a programmable thermostat--yet!--and my husband and I are nothing if not incapable of followthrough, so the house pretty much stays at 60*F right now (rather than dropping the temperature over night, etc.). And so far, despite some complaints on the part of visitors (who are typically polite about the situation as they quietly put their coats back on) it's really not bad.

It does take adjustment, though. If you're used to 70*F, you cannot just drop the temp by
10 degrees and expect to be hunky-dory about it. The best thing we did, in fact, was not turn the heat up in the first place. So far this winter, I've not set the temperature over 62*F, and that was something of a concession to my Gigi for her visit over Christmas. I've found that if I push the temperature below 58*F, my nose gets cold inside, and for some reason this bugs me more than I can say, so I'm compromising with 60*F (until I figure out how to knit a nosewarmer--or make one of these! [youtube video] Oh, I love Beaker and Bunsen!).

The main way we deal with colder indoor temperatures is, as I said above, to dress in layers. All of us wear at least a t-shirt and overshirt during the day. My husband and I both have thermals under our pants. I try to get the kids to wear pajama pants under their regular pants (although since my older son is at school during the day, he'd get too hot that way and I try get him to add clothes when he gets home). I am also continually amazed by how my children just don't seem to notice the cold. Yes, I do try and keep them covered, but I'm always looking over and seeing that they've taken their socks off, or their overshirt, or who knows what. So keeping their clothes on at an appropriate level is a bit of a struggle, but one I won't concede.

We also sleep mostly together, and often with hot water bottles. The boys have opted to sleep in the same bed, and we're fine with that, and my husband and I sleep together. Now, I should say a few words about hot water bottles. Those words are "GET" "ONE" and "NOW". My favorite luxury, by a long shot, is to sit on the couch with a hot water bottle under my feet, and maybe even (bliss!) one on my lap, with a book or knitting, and a cup of hot tea. This is the sort of luxury one cannot experience in a 72*F house--it's just not possible. We've got four water bottles--two for our bed and two for the boy's beds. I bought some cheap fleece and sewed some bottle covers for them, just to make them a bit more pleasant to have against the skin. Everyone loves them. I will probably buy a few more this year, and maybe even knit some cutesy covers (although fleece has much to recommend it, not the least of which wicking away the odd stray droplets of water that the outside of the bottle might have on it). And remarkably, even after a full night in bed with us, I've found the water bottles to still be warm when we get up--not hot, like they were the previous night, but still warmer than body temperature. And naturally, we have piles of quilts & blankets on our beds, too, which we can layer as we will.

What about when we're up and around? Well, honestly, if I'm up and doing, I don't notice the temperature at all (except for that whole 58*F cold-nose thing). We still dress in layers, but activity warms the body very nicely. I've also completed my first set of fingerless gloves, which I've been wearing around to keep my hands warm while also being able to do work (like right now).

But if we can hack 60*F with relatively little adjustment in our lifestyle, how much further could we push it? Now I start laying in plans. Here are some of the things I'm planning/hoping to do either this winter or next to go even lower:

1. Sew blanket barriers to section off our house--and heat the part of the house that we're actually in.
2. Try out a space heater or two rather than using central heating. Now, I'll admit I'm a bit lukewarm on this idea, because I've been given to understand that space heaters are spectacularly inefficient. But even an inefficient space heater might be better overall than very efficient whole-house heating, so I'll give it a shot.
3. Make a kotatsu. I got some great inspiration on this topic today from Colin Beavan over at the No Impact Man blog, including making a japanese kotatsu: http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2009/01/how-to-cut-out.html I'd never heard of a kotatsu, and in some ways it's just another version of a space heater, but options are always good.

What else can we do? Well, partially as an excuse to feed my knitting habit, I'll be making everyone some close-fitting wool caps for indoors (not those big, nobbly woolen hats which are great for outdoors but frankly feel silly when you're indoors--even if indoors is 50*F). I'll probably knit up some more fingerless gloves, which were quite easy, and I've got some leftover yarn for them anyway. But I'm reasonably sure that going lower in temperature than we are now will require having some source of warmth to go to, whether it's a space heater, a kotatsu, or hanging out in the kitchen while I bake bread. Someday having a woodburning stove might be nice, but that's firmly in the "pipedream" category (ahahahaaa! bad pun). Anyone got other ideas?