5 ms·
3C is a lot if you're talking Celsius--but I do this at night (set thermostat to 60F-61F) as cold temps under layers of blanket is actually beneficial to sleepi
by opensores 5y ago
3C is a lot if you're talking Celsius--but I do this at night (set thermostat to 60F-61F) as cold temps under layers of blanket is actually beneficial to sleeping.
Older houses sometimes still can benefit from insulation improvements.
So go in this order:
1. effective insulation
2. conscientious and smart use of energy and avoidance of very inefficient heating systems. avoid heating large areas when they don't really need to be at very warm temperatures. (careful though to avoid damp cold range of temperatures where wood rot and permanent damage to homes will happen). Avoid unburnt natural gas, eg in badly maintained or cheap cooktops. The ideal household kitchen has ~ 4 gas burners, and one or two induction burners flush with the counter, eg
https://www.amazon.com/Countertop-Portable-Induction-170-Minute-BT-200T1/dp/B08PF36P29/ https://www.amazon.com/Countertop-Portable-Induction-170-Min... This minimizes unlit gas for those very short heating needs in the kitchen.
3. think about upgrading to very efficient systems. These most promising could be (depending on your area and scale of heating needs):
-- electric-heat cogeneration
-- heat pumps that use the large volume of ground underneath the basement as geothermal heat-mass reservoir. Heat the ground mass during the summer to provide AC, and squirrel away the cold thermal mass during late fall and late winter+spring.
- IshKebab 5y agoWho leaves their heating on at night?
- jopsen 5y agoMy house has district heating, feeding into floor.. turning heat up/down takes effect many hours later. House is also well insulated, with heat recycling ventilation. Objective is to keep a consistent temperature.
- durovo 5y agoWhen saying things like this, it is better to contextualize by giving some information about where you live. Some people live in areas where temperatures go as low as -20~30 C and not leaving the heating on can damage the house infrastructure. In other areas, where the temperatures only go down to -2~3C, you can get away with never turning the heating on.
- jan_g 5y agoIf you have floor heating + heat pump, then the manufacturer recommendation is to keep it running 24/7 from October to April. That's for the climate where I live, elsewhere this period may be shorter.
- lucb1e 5y agoWhy though? Is it to not have disappointed customers because it takes 4 hours to heat up and it's harder to explain to people how to set a timer to turn on at 3am, or because keeping a higher temperature delta between indoors and outdoors is actually more efficient with this system?
- genewitch 5y agoI'd wager it's to prevent damage if the stuff inside the pipes freezes/expands.
- lucb1e 5y agoFloor heating won't go from heating temperatures (30°C? I don't know exactly) to freezing across 8 hours of sleep, even if it's -25°C outside. The advice also doesn't have to be "turn it off", just "turn it down to 5°C" which would be safe indefinitely. There has to be another reason why the advice is to keep heating 24/7.
- jan_g 5y agoThe controls available aren't in the sense of thermostats - for example, you can't ask it to keep temperature at 21 degrees during the day and 18 degrees during the night. Instead, it has something called 'heating profiles'. There are summer (passive cooling, essentially) and winter profile (heating). And for the winter profile you can set the level of heating: from -5 to +5 degrees compared to what it considers optimal. I have mine always set to -5, because even at that setting it's warm enough. Note that 'degrees' in this instance is not the air temperature in the rooms, but I believe the water temperature in the pipes. In other words, it will automatically adjust depending on the time of day, temperature outside, etc. It is possible to influence how it works, via 'administrator' settings meant for the repair guys, but I haven't touched those.
- bialpio 5y agoI do (suburbs of Seattle), otherwise my house would not stay above 17C overnight, especially with the last few nights we had.
- dageshi 5y agoIs there some reason why that's an issue if you're in bed? I live in the UK and well we don't put the heating on at night ever. Doesn't matter if it's a snowstorm or below freezing outside. Heating comes on first thing in the morning, but overnight you'd be pretty much fine in bed.
- HstryrsrBttn 5y agoYeah, and that's the reason Irland and the UK is full of moldy shitholes. Everytime I watched the housing offerings in Dublin I wondered how any sane being would spend upwards 1M£ for a small, moldy goat pen while parking their Porsche infront.
- crtasm 5y agoIsn't mold more to do with not airing out the house to let moisture out?
- bialpio 5y agoYeah, you don't want to set the thermostat too low to protect the outdoor faucets (not all of them are freeze-proof, especially in the places where temps below freezing are uncommon). I also don't want to wait for 2hrs in the morning for the house to reach comfortable temperature, and would like to be able to go to the bathroom in the night w/o it being too cold. Edit: is it more common to use forced-air heating where you live? Are buildings brick/concrete? Heating vía radiators w/ warm water and concrete buildings tend to have more inertia in my experience, the temp will not drop down that much overnight, but that's not the case in my current home.
- dgellow 5y agoEvery places I lived at in Germany the heating system is turned off at night for the entire building. Same in Switzerland. I always assumed that was the norm?
- HstryrsrBttn 5y agoNot off. Throttled down.
- dgellow 5y agoThanks for correcting, I just checked and you seem to be right
- blindmute 5y agoWho doesn't? I keep my house at 23C. The cost is negligible. I don't want to wake up to pee and be shivering in the bathroom.
- Ekaros 5y agoWho doesn't? Near zero temperatures outside mean that it gets cold awfully quickly and with sub-zero temperatures there is lot of risks with pipes and so on.
- IshKebab 5y agoSure but you just set the heating to 12C or something. There's no need to leave it fully on at 20C.
- Rarok 5y agoMany buildings hear use electricity for heating, electricity is cheaper at night. We have heaters that heat some kind of ceramic material and keeps releasing the heat during all the day.
- zamalek 5y ago1.5: wherever possible, heat people and not rooms. The BedJet is one easy example of this, but there are others.
- opensores 5y agothanks. that is a great idea. Sweet that this can be run for cooling too. (I sleep horribly in the summer because it often doesn't cool down enough and I feel bad about running the AC for too much time.)