Socks away! End of the central heating challenge

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

Tags: Central heating, Earth, Energy, Frostbite, Living room, Room temperature, Spain, Television
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