House heating upgrade

[tibi]

The radiant heaters will eventually heat the room, too. they just heat you before heating the air like a convection heater.

Think of it this way - if a radiant heater is outputting a kilowatt, but there's no person in the room, the energy goes somewhere - eventually it may be that objects are unevenly heated if they receive the radiant energy but as they get warmed, the air around them will be warmed, too.

As far as the costs go, I wonder if:
1) the 120 target isn't a little idealistic
2) if it includes respondents heating less square footage than you are. Not as a matter of building size, but as a matter of not heating the entire house to comfortable

You may be hoping to achieve efficiency that isn't efficiency, but rather lower average house temp when including unheated areas. Or that isn't properly compiled or expressed by the system.

I've always been stingy on heat and air. Last year, our A/C is finally running out of charge on an outdated refrigerant. One month, our A/C bill (hotter than normal, too) reached $250 above normal electrical consumption. This as a month with a lot of 90s F and I have a spouse who is unbending and who also decided it should be colder than normal.

this spring, I will replace the A/C with something more efficient as it's 40 years old now, but when I polled neighbors with similar size cooled area (2000SF cooled), they returned figures a lot more like my "bad year" than typical.

My current 12-month average is 150 €, but it is before winter. And I am heating with wood as well in the fireplace, so it depends on what the winter will be like. The situation is that I am working from home and I am home alone, so I heat only the smallest room in the house, where I incidentally work. But since January 2023, my wife and son will be both back at home so the consumption will be much higher and thus I am looking for alternatives.

 

[D_W]

are you usually sitting in one place while working from home? if so, I can say that sitting on a 50 watt heating pad will easily make up for a 10F deficit (about 6C).

I work in a 900 square foot area that's 10 degrees cooler than upstairs, and I just don't feel like wasting the energy to heat it 10F. As a last stop before considering adding vents to the forced air ducting (they only vent in the main living area), I bought a seat size heating pad. I think it would not be worth much for therapeutic purposes as it doesn't get very warm, but it's bonkers comfortable to lay on the chair and sit on it. Far more effective than a 1500W heater just heating the corner where I sit.

 

[tibi]

are you usually sitting in one place while working from home? if so, I can say that sitting on a 50 watt heating pad will easily make up for a 10F deficit (about 6C).

I work in a 900 square foot area that's 10 degrees cooler than upstairs, and I just don't feel like wasting the energy to heat it 10F. As a last stop before considering adding vents to the forced air ducting (they only vent in the main living area), I bought a seat size heating pad. I think it would not be worth much for therapeutic purposes as it doesn't get very warm, but it's bonkers comfortable to lay on the chair and sit on it. Far more effective than a 1500W heater just heating the corner where I sit.

The room where I work has a consumption of 660 W / hour, so that is not much. On the contrary living room + kitchen area has 2kW. But I use a fireplace once my wife and son come back home in the afternoon. But they will be at home for the whole year since January, so I will be using the fireplace more (I have enough wood for the whole winter, I think).

 

[D_W]

with spouse and kids involved, I haven't got a suggestion. My spouse and kids (mostly spouse) will not tolerate any inconvenience. I grew up a large older house where the upstairs was only heated for a few hours before bed and a few hours after waking and then was then set off. I spent a lot of the evenings in the upstairs, anyway, heating just myself when needed. It's a lost art, but my mother was stingy so my father encountered no resistance.

 

[tibi]

with spouse and kids involved, I haven't got a suggestion. My spouse and kids (mostly spouse) will not tolerate any inconvenience. I grew up a large older house where the upstairs was only heated for a few hours before bed and a few hours after waking and then was then set off. I spent a lot of the evenings in the upstairs, anyway, heating just myself when needed. It's a lost art, but my mother was stingy so my father encountered no resistance.

I fully agree that people were more frugal in the past days. Now people throw everything away and buy new. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” is no longer fashionable, albeit there is a new popular word called "upcycling". I will try to measure consumption this winter when using both wood and electricity and compare it with the last winter when only electricity was used. It will not be 100% accurate, as I would have to take into account the outside temperatures for both this and last winter, but it will give me a general idea if it is feasible to use wood and electricity to mitigate the bills.

 

[D_W]

I fully agree that people were more frugal in the past days. Now people throw everything away and buy new. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without” is no longer fashionable, albeit there is a new popular word called "upcycling". I will try to measure consumption this winter when using both wood and electricity and compare it with the last winter when only electricity was used. It will not be 100% accurate, as I would have to take into account the outside temperatures for both this and last winter, but it will give me a general idea if it is feasible to use wood and electricity to mitigate the bills.

not condemning lack of frugality, it's just the nature of things. My parents were born 10 years after the depression ended. their parents never forgot it. mine now spend the money sometimes for the comfort - they're close enough to the end that they can forget irrational fears. My generation generally always does if they have the means.

I don't heat my basement out of principle. It just seems like a waste. I'm not a green wonk or anything, just stubborn when considering such things when something cheap works.

heating efficiently with wood was a whole art here as when I was a kid in a rural area, but as people have increased income and personal tastes, it's still done, but far less. the rural air was pretty unhealthy - not with industrial particulates, but with wood smoke.

 

[Terrytpot]

heating efficiently with wood was a whole art here as when I was a kid in a rural area, but as people have increased income and personal tastes… the rural air was pretty unhealthy - not with industrial particulates, but with wood smoke.

As a child of the sixties whose father was a member of the British armed forces I’ve moved around quite a bit and lived in places with all sorts of means to keep warm although the extract above is something that has struck me as being especially relevant in the UK over the last 5 years or so. The house my parents finally settled down in back in the early 80’s had an open fire , a real treat for those special occasions like Christmas, but owing to the pollution they had caused back in the 60’s , there was a blanket ban covering the town where they lived for burning coal leaving smokeless coke (not the white Colombian version I hasten to add) as the only fuel you were allowed to use which priced it out of common use and no doubt assisted in the surge towards gas fired heating systems. Over the last decade I’ve noticed more and more properties with shiny new stainless steel flues creeping up their outside’s in the area and can’t help wondering if whatever enforcement was put in place back in the 60’s to police folks burning coal or other polluting materials is no longer in place. Maybe it’s being done by people who are “new” to the area and aren’t aware of the restrictions or is it just a more affluent way to provide some additional heat and at the same time give more toddlers the chance to do what I apparently did and to sit happily talking to the flickering flames of an open fire?

 

[cowtown_eric]

Is that a side-by side duplex????

Wierd idea, but it actually happened in our neighbourhood.
. One neighbour tapped into his other neighbours electrics,when the house was being built.. His neighbour was paying for his 'lectrcity for probably 20 years

Next question...have you been up in the attic? Buiders and insulators have been know (and I've seen it) to chintz when folks cannot see it.