As part of our series of energy challenges, guest blogger Lee Colgate agreed to give up central heating at a time when most of us are turning it on.

In his last post, Lee told us all about the hardships endured while avoiding frostbite on holiday in Spain. In this, his final post, he updates us on central-heating-free life in November, back in Blighty.

Well, it’s finally over. Just in time and thank god. We take so many things for granted these days, but still I underestimated what it would be like to actually live without central heating at the back end of the year in the UK.

As you may have read, we ran away to Spain for a couple of weeks, a little way into the challenge. Some very clever editing by the talented Living team (I ranted about orange women wearing yellow on cut price airlines; I don’t know why; wait, yes I do – read on) on that particular report managed to conceal the fact that I was slightly the worse for alcoholic wear at the time of writing. It won’t have hidden in any way whatsoever that I was feeling deeply smug and having a thoroughly lovely time.

Post-smugness reality

To fulfil the challenge and make the whole thing worthwhile, we committed to leaving the heating off into November on our return. To be honest, the weather at the beginning of the challenge really wasn’t that severe, but it had all taken a turn for the worse by the time we got back. And, you know, it was actually not all that nice with the heating off. Who’d have thought?

<!– The two of us didn’t actually suffer all that much. I bought Colin a pair of the rather fetching socks I was sporting in the photo that accompanied my first post. In a different colour, obviously. It’s not like we have matching anoraks or anything like that. We wore rather more than is customary when indoors (or indeed outdoors in, ooooh, let’s say Finland) and added more if it got colder.

But our poor cat had a slightly harder time of it. Our flooring, apart from the bedroom and living room, is basically a linoleum bonanza, the sofa is leather and the…no, I can’t think of another word right now…poofs are (deep breath) ‘leather-look’. Not at all cosy for the poor little mite, who consequently followed us round like a puppy and launched himself into the nearest lap as soon as we sat down. Bless ‘im.

After a few days of our being back, present in the house, not dead (I’m fairly certain corpses don’t do much to raise the ambient temperature, at least not for long) and doing the usual things like cooking, ironing, showering, etc. the temperature indoors actually settled down to a fairly constant 19 degrees.

What never went away, though, and this was the most uncomfortable thing, was the damp. Without any strong localised heat sources getting much hotter than the ambient temperature it was almost, and allow me to exaggerate here for a minute to get my point across, like living in a cave. It’s not that there was damp running down the walls, it was just very uncomfortable and you could almost imagine things were going mouldy all around you. Given that we don’t have a tumble dryer, there was the added complication with laundry that almost led to things going mouldy all over you. But we don’t need to dwell on that. Why on Earth the TV has to go on about pessaries while I’m eating every evening I’ll never understand, so I’ll spare you.

Turning up the heat

We have turned the heating back on now, with the kind permission of our Living masters, and hallelujah! I’m just getting over a rather nasty cold I picked up while doing a half marathon in the weather-warning weather a couple of weekends back and I’m sure the lack of heating in the house didn’t help much in the early part of my recovery. It’s only set to 20, as opposed to our usual 21. I guess that’s partly because we got along OK(ish) for a while at 19 and partly because we’ve got so used to wearing outdoor clothes indoors that we just don’t need it any higher. Walking on the carpets no longer feels like walking on a bed of moss. Our clothes are dry again. And the cat’s happy.

Paperless quarterly billing means we won’t really have an idea of any savings we might have made until some time in December, but if it’s at all interesting when we see the results, I’ll be certain to come back and comment here to let you know.

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Originally posted 2009-11-18 09:19:00. Republished by Blog Post Promoter