Heat and cold
This is the place where we belong, but it's cold here. Winter isn't even at its worst.
This is an old house. We're trying to figure out how to cut down the heat loss. We bought draft stops for the front and back door, and put weatherstripping on the vertical line of the back door. We knew we would have to deal with that, as we could see daylight under and up and down it in summertime. The draft there is solved.
We've put plastic film in the windows of our bedroom and the entry vestibule. I don't think it helps a whole lot, but it helps a little. The study will be done too, and the window behind the fridge in the corner of the nook is cold, but that's the least accessible piece of glass in the house right now, so I don't know if we'll attack it or not.
The big, long windows in the living room (116 inches) and the kitchen (54 inches) are newer vinyl slider windows, and triple paned. (They're also the only one with screens.) There are four vertical-sash windows, in the bathroom, each bedroom, and the straight-back window in the kitchen nook. Two of them open, two don't. (They all should, we'll have to see if we can do something with that come summer.) The side window in the nook, the entry, and the big dining room window are simple single panes. With the blinds on the dining room window, it's not cold--and since the twist wand is missing and the raising mechanism is cranky and the bus stop is right on the other side of that window and would look straight into our bedroom, we don't mess with those blinds at all. They stay down and closed, and still make the room light.
The bathroom is actually the warmest room, that window is tight. I have realized, though, that it also has four foot high wainscoting of honey pine, and maybe it's just that it has another layer of wall, essentially.
The house is stucco on the outside, and lathe and plaster on the inside. It must just not hold the heat well. The basement doesn't have much barrier between its colder air and our floor. The floor in our room along the outside wall is freezing. That's my side of the bed, and he gets the furnace vent. After several years in this bed and many more years together in general, we are not going to be switching sides, but I'm cold.
When we went to Utah recently, I turned off the furnace. We came back into the house at 5 p.m. and turned the furnace back on, and it didn't go off for four hours. It turned off, finally, at 9 on the dot, and at 10 I realized that I was still cold because I'd only set it to 65, not 70. I forgot that the dots on the dial are the 5's, not the 10's; the thermostat is so old that you can only read the numbers (the tens) in good daylight.
And when it's running, you can sit right in front of a vent and barely feel anything except air... at our old house, the furnace used to start up and the kids would vie for space in front of the vent in the dining room, where it blew the hardest. "Warmies!" Not here. I have no idea if there is any insulation in the attic floor--the only access is inside the bedroom closet, ten feet up. I guess we'll see when it snows, whether the roof melts fast. It makes me realize that our old house was pretty tight, despite the draft we never fully licked from the front entry, where the door jamb wasn't quite square. (Old houses.)
So, I guess I'll go off to my one blanket, two quilts, a very heavy chenille bedspread, and the light blanket I added on my side last night on top, and hope that my feet warm up before I'm asleep--but past experience says it's not likely. Not that cold feet are a brand new problem....
Warm pajamas for Christmas?
This is an old house. We're trying to figure out how to cut down the heat loss. We bought draft stops for the front and back door, and put weatherstripping on the vertical line of the back door. We knew we would have to deal with that, as we could see daylight under and up and down it in summertime. The draft there is solved.
We've put plastic film in the windows of our bedroom and the entry vestibule. I don't think it helps a whole lot, but it helps a little. The study will be done too, and the window behind the fridge in the corner of the nook is cold, but that's the least accessible piece of glass in the house right now, so I don't know if we'll attack it or not.
The big, long windows in the living room (116 inches) and the kitchen (54 inches) are newer vinyl slider windows, and triple paned. (They're also the only one with screens.) There are four vertical-sash windows, in the bathroom, each bedroom, and the straight-back window in the kitchen nook. Two of them open, two don't. (They all should, we'll have to see if we can do something with that come summer.) The side window in the nook, the entry, and the big dining room window are simple single panes. With the blinds on the dining room window, it's not cold--and since the twist wand is missing and the raising mechanism is cranky and the bus stop is right on the other side of that window and would look straight into our bedroom, we don't mess with those blinds at all. They stay down and closed, and still make the room light.
The bathroom is actually the warmest room, that window is tight. I have realized, though, that it also has four foot high wainscoting of honey pine, and maybe it's just that it has another layer of wall, essentially.
The house is stucco on the outside, and lathe and plaster on the inside. It must just not hold the heat well. The basement doesn't have much barrier between its colder air and our floor. The floor in our room along the outside wall is freezing. That's my side of the bed, and he gets the furnace vent. After several years in this bed and many more years together in general, we are not going to be switching sides, but I'm cold.
When we went to Utah recently, I turned off the furnace. We came back into the house at 5 p.m. and turned the furnace back on, and it didn't go off for four hours. It turned off, finally, at 9 on the dot, and at 10 I realized that I was still cold because I'd only set it to 65, not 70. I forgot that the dots on the dial are the 5's, not the 10's; the thermostat is so old that you can only read the numbers (the tens) in good daylight.
And when it's running, you can sit right in front of a vent and barely feel anything except air... at our old house, the furnace used to start up and the kids would vie for space in front of the vent in the dining room, where it blew the hardest. "Warmies!" Not here. I have no idea if there is any insulation in the attic floor--the only access is inside the bedroom closet, ten feet up. I guess we'll see when it snows, whether the roof melts fast. It makes me realize that our old house was pretty tight, despite the draft we never fully licked from the front entry, where the door jamb wasn't quite square. (Old houses.)
So, I guess I'll go off to my one blanket, two quilts, a very heavy chenille bedspread, and the light blanket I added on my side last night on top, and hope that my feet warm up before I'm asleep--but past experience says it's not likely. Not that cold feet are a brand new problem....
Warm pajamas for Christmas?
I noticed the same thing - that the air coming out of your vent blows hard, but not very warm. Have you tried putting up curtains with thermal backing in the bedroom? We have them in our living room because our big front window is drafty. I'll start looking around for warm PJs for Christmas for you.
ReplyDeleteI would hate to lose all the light--if we turn the bedroom into a dark cold cave, I'll never wake up and get out of bed. I forgot to include that I miss our clock thermostat. Now I have to get out of bed into the cold and dial the setting back up. Before, the rise would be set automatically, and it would be warming up itself--or, if I stayed asleep too long, I would wake up because it was too warm under all the blankets. One of the things that we had to program in that thermostat was how often we wanted the furnace to engage--maybe that would make some difference. Anyone have any ideas?
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