HEAT
This describes the slow dawning of a very simple idea and is an illustration of how difficult it is to think in a new way, especially for an old man set in his ways.
My house was built in 1970 or so by the Rath sisters. At the time electric baseboard heat was considered the latest thing, so that is what my house has. Every room has a thermostat which controls the heat in that room which comes from eight foot long baseboard finned heaters with metal covers. The two bathrooms have space heaters which can be turned on for brief periods, otherwise they get their heat from the rest of the house. I don’t know about the insulation in the walls, ceiling and floors, but doubt that it is adequate. My windows aren’t double paned. Installing a furnace and all the ducts necessary to heat the house is expensive. The house gets as much sunshine as you can get in this latitude but solar panels are also expensive and an investment for the future, of which I don’t have much left, so might not be worth it.
So the question is how to save on my electric bill for heat in the winter and cooling in the summer. For the summer I have a small air conditioner in the bedroom and a larger one in the large living room where I am most of the day.
The first, obvious step, was to not heat the guest room or Kathe’s knitting room unless I have guests, which is almost never. The second obvious step is to turn down the heat in the bedroom during the day and the heat in the living room during the night. That means that I am only heating one room at any one time. But the living room, kitchen, dining area is rather large and needs all of the baseboard heat on at one time to stay warm.
This has been the way that I have tried to cut the electric bill for the last twenty years. The house has a fireplace, but I reason that fireplace heat mainly goes up the chimney and is very inefficient. A fire also takes some effort to maintain. We used it when we first moved in here 30 years ago but now use it only when the power goes off, which was only once this year.
And then, finally, after all this time I made a profound realization. I wasn’t interested in heating the house. The house never complained when it was cold, particularly the knitting room stuffed with yarn, which kept itself comfortably warm. It wasn’t the house that I needed to keep warm, it was me, particularly my hands and my feet because with a sweater on the rest of me stays warm.
So this is my new system. I don’t turn the heat on anywhere in the house and I have one small heater on the floor which warms my feet and another small desktop heater that warms my hands as I sit here and type as I am doing now. This is the least efficient way to heat the house and the most efficient way to heat me. My feet and my hands are toasty warm.
It is efficient in one other way which it has taken me these thirty years to realize. Heat rises. Which means that when I heat the living room I first make the air under the ceiling warm and then, slowly slowly the room gets warm enough so that the heat finally gets down to my hands and finally to my feet. I have a ceiling fan which I reverse in the winter and this is presumed to make the air circulate and brings the warm air down to floor level. But it isn’t very efficient. The result has been that when my son walks into the house he says it is unbearably warm, even when my hands are still cold and my ankles chilly.
Now the heat from the small space heater first toasts my ankles and the rises to warm the rest of me and the small tabletop heater warms my fingers and then my face and what is left over rises to the ceiling and takes a little chill off the rest of the room.
It has taken me thirty years to realize that heat rises and that it is my feet and my hands that need to be heated, not the rest of the house.
Of course, I only came to this realization after Kathe was no longer here. This plan wouldn’t have worked for Kathe, partly because she wouldn’t have liked a heater as her basic source of heat, secondly, she was not going to welcome visitors into a stone cold house and put a heater in front of each of them (during the pandemic we had no visitors and still have none) and thirdly when she walked around the house for any reason she wanted it to be warm. So, really, this as a cheap old man living by himself trying to think for himself. Anyone else would think what I am doing is eccentric and dumb. But I am toasty warm and loving it.d
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 