It’s finally starting to cool off and feel like fall here! Aside from being soup and sweater season, another lovely thing about fall is that utility costs are lower because you don’t have to pay to to cool or heat your house. Stretching this low utility cost season even further is one of our number one strategies for keeping our expenses down.
Let me start by sharing a classic analogy that illustrates what I’m talking about. I’m sure you’ve heard the story before, but you probably haven’t thought about it in relation to your gas or electric bill.
It is said that if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, he’ll immediately jump right out. But, if you drop the frog into comfortable water, then gradually heat the water to boiling, the frog will be toast (well, boiled).
I can picture this frog-in-the-pot scenario happening, but husband Mike thinks it would never actually happen. Either way, we’re too nice to test it out.
Whether or not the frog story is accurate, most of us would agree that gradual, subtle changes are more easily accepted than sudden, drastic changes.
I want to use the principle of the frog analogy (in the reverse) to explain how we save on heating costs.
When people hear how low we keep our thermostat during the winter they think we’re nuts! They can’t imagine changing their home thermostat from 78 degrees down to 58 degrees in the middle of January.
Neither can I! Like a frog placed in boiling water, I would hop right out!
Our secret to saving on heating bills is that we wait as long as possible to turn our heater on or light a fire in the wood stove.
Like the frog who gradually gets used to increased temperatures, our bodies gradually acclimate to a lower temperature.
In addition to normal acclimation, we dress appropriately to increase our temperature stamina. We wear sweaters and slippers around the house. In the morning, I always put a warm robe on over my pajamas when I first get up. In the evenings, you’ll find me quilting, reading, or working on the computer wearing a hoodie on with the hood on.
Our kids all have their own robes and slippers along with hoodies. We have fuzzy blankets and warm quilts in nearly every room.
Lest you worry that our kids are suffering, the truth is that our kids handle the cold (and heat) far better than us grown-ups (especially me). When we lived in my in-laws basement while we were paying off six figures of student loans, our kids would run around the cold cement floors with bare feet and and short sleeves. It didn’t even faze them.
We love challenges and competitions, so seeing how long we can go before turning on the heat (or having our first fire in the wood stove) is actually fun for us. (Maybe we are crazy.) When we eventually do turn on the heat, we don’t crank it up to 78. We just turn it up a wee bit from the temperature that we decided was just too low. If the temperature starts to dip to that point, the heater kicks in and we’re fine.
Of course waiting to turn on your heat isn’t our only strategy for saving on utilities in the winter. Here are eight additional strategies that help us keep our utility expenses down in the winter.
- Dressing warm when you’re inside means you don’t need to heat the air as much to be comfortable.
- Using these window insulation kits is a great way to prevent losing heat to drafty windows. We have found these to make a huge difference in our bedrooms.
- Consider using a space heater instead of central heat if you’re only using a small area in your house (like if you work from home and spend the entire day alone in one room),
- A draft-stopper like this or this will help from losing heat to the outside or colder areas of the house. Rolling up a towel, isn’t quite as convenient as either of those products, but it’s a free option that does the trick pretty well.
- Only heat the areas you use. Close the heating vents in unused rooms in your house (guest bedrooms, storage areas, unused basements, etc). Use the draft-stoppers linked above to prevent those closed off rooms from sharing air with parts of the house you’re heating.
- While leaving curtains open during the day can warm your house with the sunshine, close your curtains at night to provide an additional buffer from the cool outside air.
- Run your ceiling fans in reverse to push the warm air down. This is especially important if you have high ceilings since the warm air will accumulate high up. There is usually a little switch near where the fan meets the ceiling to reverse the fan’s direction.
- Having layers of bedding to create air pockets can keep you toasty enough to turn the heater down significantly. One of my readers who lives in a frigid area shared an awesome guest post several years ago where she taught her smart strategy for bedding layers. I was blown away by what a huge difference this has made!
No matter what efficiency strategies you employ, waiting as long as possible to turn on the heat and keeping the thermostat low when you do will increase your savings. Each day you wait to turn on the heat will save you money and provide a fun challenge as well.
How about you?
- How long do you wait before turning on the heat when the weather cools off?
- Do you dress warmly at home in order to keep the thermostat set low?
- Do you think the frog would really get boiled?
This freshly updated post was originally published ten years ago in October 2014.
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So, we live in a frigid, windy place with long winters. The house we’re renting has a thermostat and forced air heat powered by a propane tank. What I can’t figure out is why, even though we don’t change the thermostat, the house is freezing at night (other than around 5 in the morning when it gets really hot). Isn’t the thermostat supposes to keep it at the set temp all the time? Can anyone explain this phenomenon?
That does sound weird! The thermostat is supposed to regulate the temperature. Maybe the location of the thermostat doesn’t experience the same changes in temperature as, say, a bedroom in a far corner of the house?
This all makes perfect sense. I’m all for waiting until its absolutely necessary to turn the heat on and the same with air conditioning. My husband is usually the first to cave.
I used to room with a friend who was such a light sleeper that she’d wake up whenever the heat came on, and so she turned the heat way down to the 50s and dressed warm. Rooming with her, I came to love snuggling in bed with a thick comforter and wrapping myself in a plush robe and fuzzy socks once I got out of bed!
And my favorite trick for keeping the house warm is turning on the oven and baking lots during the cold months! We’re so enjoying baked meals and cookies since we held off from using the oven much during the summer! (we live in a small house so the heat in the kitchen does make a big difference in the rest of the house, too!)
We mainly leave our heaters (electric baseboard) set at 55 degrees to prevent any pipes freezing (we live in Central IN). If it is really cold in the evenings, we’ll close the door to the bedroom and turn up the heat in there to 64 or so for about an hour before bed to warm the room up a bit, and then turn it off when we go to sleep. It has worked pretty well so far, our heating bills last year weren’t too bad. We keep warm with a lot of throw blankets and wearing robes and slippers around the house. If we have guests over, we do turn the heat up more as we don’t want them freezing as they aren’t used to the temps.
In the summer, we wear shorts and tshirts around the house, and only ran a few fans at night if we needed some extra air. We do have central air (yes our house is weird—central air but baseboard heat), and really only used it twice last summer, both times when we had lots of family over for parties. I couldn’t imagine trying to pay the bills of keeping the house at a steady 70 degrees or so all year long.
That’s great Jennifer! It sounds like you have a great system worked out for winter and summer! Dressing for the weather makes such a difference!
Living in SWFL, we don’t run heat…but the A/C bills!! I try to keep the temp at 79. DH would love it to be 74, but I tell him we wouldn’t be able to pay the electric bill. 😉 Now that it’s cooling off a bit, I try to turn off the a/c overnight, but it gets too warm for DH by the time he comes home from work, so we run it for a couple hours. As soon as it cools off outside though, I turn it off & open the windows. I celebrate when we can finally leave it off for the winter! When it does get cool out, I do some baking to keep the house warm.
How nice that you don’t worry about heat, but I’m sure all the A/C makes up for it! We do a lot of opening and closing the windows to help with regulating the temperature in the house, too.
My husband always tells me that if your head is cold, your whole body will be cold. But if your head is warm, chances are that the rest of your body will be warm. So, we (all 4 of us) gladly wear cozy winter hats around the house pretty much all winter. This helps with the thermostat, but don’t be fooled–we also keep the thermostat MUCH higher than yourself, as we don’t adapt to the cold like you guys can. Also, our new home is HIGHLY efficient so it doesn’t cost that much to heat. It’s less to heat our 3-level home than it was to heat our 1-level condo…THAT is how efficient our radiant floor heating is. Also, I will add that with our radiant floor heating, we did an experiment last winter. During the day we always turned the upstairs thermostats way down, and turned them back up a bit at night for sleeping so the kids wouldn’t freeze. We did this for a few months. Then for one month we stopped, and just left the thermostat alone at the warmer temperature…and our bill went down 30 bucks! So with our type of heating, it was cheaper to leave it warmer all the time than it was to turn it down during certain times. 🙂
Its amazing what a difference a hat makes. My MIL wears a hat all the time! That’s great that your house is so efficient!!
We do the same things… fleece blankets and thick slipper socks are how I get through. LOL. When we lived in eastern WA, we tried to hold out until November to turn the heater on. Now that we live in England and it barely freezes here, we have been able to hold out until December/January and only run it only on some days. It’s so nice to only have to run the heater for a couple months!
That’s great! You’re probably tougher that the locals when it comes to temperature!
We keep our house freezing all year long. In the summer the AC is always cranking. The hubby and I joke we would eat Ramen every day before we would sweat in our own home. Trust me, I grew up without AC in the deep south. Its. Not. Fun. Because we love our house FREEZING we almost never turn on the heater in our home. Last year we turned on the central heat three times max, and used a space heater less than 10 times. If I know it will be super cold outside I plan our dinner to be baked in the oven so that it will heat up the house. If for some reason that residual heat isn’t enough we will then use a space heater in just the living/dining area. The three times we turned on the central heat last year was because it was under 10 degrees outside (We live in Reno, Nv, get all four seasons, and experience snow pretty often)
That’s awesome that you agree temperature-wise! When it’s extra cold is a great time to bake in the oven!
I live in Spain and the houses here are designed to lose heat to keep them cool in the summer. The problem is they don’t have a contingency plan for the winter and heating a home with cathedral ceilings is not an option, so when winter comes along the house is colder inside than outside: I can see my breath for a good 3 months of the year no matter which room I’m in. But you get used to it: we keep warm by eating hot meals, drinking warm drinks and wearing lots of layers. It’s not like central heating and A/C have been around since the stone-age, is it?
That’s neat that the houses are designed like that when it’s summer, but it makes for a rough winter. Warm meals and hot drinks are great ways to keep warm!
Every year our goal is to wait until at least November 1st before turning the heat on. Many years, we’ll finally cave at the end of October if we have a cold snap. But this year, I think we’ll actually make it as it has been pretty warm during the day still. We do the same thing in the spring for turning on the AC–we wait as long as we can.
I don’t like a really cool house–makes it more difficult for me to breathe, especially at night– but we don’t have it cranked up either. We’re definitely wearing winter clothing in the winter—no shorts here while the heat is running! LOL
We do the same thing with the A/C too. 🙂
We keep the heat off as long as possible too (when we have control over it – not this winter unfortunately). What I don’t like is that we acclimate to the colder temps and almost die from heat exhaustion when we walk into a store to anyone else’s house!
That’s so true! It makes other people’s houses feel so unbearably hot!
We keep our heat at about 58-MAYBE 62- during the winter, and even that we play the “how long can we go” game. We live in upstate NY, where it gets mightly chilly during the winter. Last year we went until mid-December, and the year before it was the beginning of January before we even touched the thermostat. We do have one of those electric fireplace heaters that we use occasionally to take the chill off, but for the most part, its sweatshirts, socks and blankets for us. We have 2 young children ages 6 and 3, with on one the way due in February, so we will have to turn it up for sure when she arrives.. but until then, we can just not financially afford to keep our heat on all the time with the oil prices as high as they are!
I’ve hear that oil prices are outrageous. That’s great that the family is willing to be tough until the baby comes.
In architecture school they taught us that this is the idea of adjusting your “clo” level to create more comfort in a wider range of temperatures. It really works! For instance, when it’s 80 in the summer we’re just fine without air conditioning, but we’re certainly not going to heat our house to 80 in the winter. We adapt really well! So far it’s in the 40s and we’re just starting to turn on the heat. Being pregnant and or breastfeeding for the past 4 years really helps me stay warm too, but the rest of my family doesn’t have that advantage! 🙂
Pregnancy and breastfeeding during the winter definitely has benefits! 🙂
Heating in the bus is going to be… interesting. I think we are planning in buying an electric heater, since our electricity is free via solar, and find some way to channel it up to the upper levels at night!
That’s a great idea! May as well use electric if it’s free! Heat rises, so if you the upper level is open, the warm air should get up there!
I call it our “thermastat dance”–my husband turns it up and I turn it down. It goes like that all winter long. I like a cooler home. I sleep better and I don’t like the high heating bills. My husband on the other hand likes a warmer home. Fortunately the weather in PA has been mild so far this fall and we haven’t had to turn the heater on except for one night when it did dip into the 20’s.
Hooray for a warmer fall!
It was pretty cold up here at the beginning on September, so I’m proud that we made it to November.
We used to be a 72 all the time house. Last year we tried 68 day/65 night and it wasn’t too tough. This year we’re trying 65 day 62 night (just got a new thermostat in Celsius, so it looks like we’ll be trying 64.4 day 59 night). We’ll see how it goes.
Sweaters and slippers definitely help. I always say I can’t put the temperature too low because of our toddler daughter, but she seems to stay warm even when she’s running around naked.
Good for you Emily! That sounds like an awesome goal! Young kids are pretty amazing– I guess they’re always moving so they’re always burning calories!
My teen-age girls do feel the cold unlike when they were little and running around but instead of turning up the heat to heat the entire house, I’ve given them both electric blankets that they use to snuggle up with when they’re watching a video, doing homework, reading, etc., and it allows the rest of the house to be at a cooler temperature. They automatically turn off after a couple of hours. Of course sweaters and slippers are a must too, but the blankets give them their own little “heaters” so they don’t feel so hard done by. We’ve also installed an air-source heat pump, which has cut our heating bill in half.
Those are great ideas Maia! Way to go!
We also keep our thermostat around 58 or 60, but I have two dogs laying on me at all times…it’s actually summer that we have to control ourselves from turning on the ac. Besides due to brown adipose tissue thermogenesis it’s actually healthy for you to keep your thermostat low. http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/well/2014/07/17/lets-cool-it-in-the-bedroom/
That’s an interesting article Judi. I had no idea that cooler temperatures could help people with diabetes. I don’t have diabetes, but I’m afraid I might get it someday because I love sugar so much.
I totally thought you didn’t pay utilities 🙂 I also play the “how long before we turn the heat on” but I have already lost. To be fair, I’m in CT and we have already had one frost morning. Stay warm!
You win Beth! 🙂 It gets a lot colder in CT than it does where I am!
I have tried this method year after year and can not seem to trick my husband. I keep telling him that I don’t want to wear shorts in the winter and pants in the summer because of the AC. When it is cold out, I expect cooler temps inside too – like my body just naturally regulated to it. Before I met Mr. SSC, I used to live in Boston, and I figured out what temperature the pipes would freeze at, and kept the house a few degrees above that…. maybe a little extreme. But I liked bundling up in blankets!
But, I’ve used a similar method to switch to skim milk from 2%.
That’s awesome that you are temperature tough and that your husband is the one who caves!
As for milk, when we got married, I drank skim and my husband drank whole milk. We settled on 2% for years. Now we drink skim though because it’s more than 50 cents a gallon cheaper.