Cold rooms

Perhaps you have a ghost or spirit that is following you?  Or a spiritual presence in your home?

As silly as this is, it made me giggle out loud!! Jennifer Love Hewitt may be knocking on your door any minute now! Watch out!

As silly as this is, it made me giggle out loud!! Jennifer Love Hewitt may be knocking on your door any minute now! Watch out!

 

wait -- are you saying that in God's chosen country of the US of A, there are no cold rooms in houses in the winter?!   

I know you weren't talking to me, but I can't resist replying!

The first winter we lived in our old house in Wisconsin, we had frost on the inside walls of the upstairs bedroom!  It was freezing!

We should've torn the place down and started over instead of trying to insulate here and there whenever we were trying to do any remodeling.  There was no proper basement and it was a very small house (imagine, raising 2 kids in an American house that was under 1000 square feet??!! lol  Who knew such small houses actually existed in the US?!), so my ex couldn't see crawling into any crawl spaces to put in duct work for central heating.  Man, I don't miss that place!  It was perfect in the spring and the autumn, but otherwise, you froze in the winter and roasted in the summer - he never got 'round to upgrading the wiring, so I wouldn't even trust a window air conditioner...

Did I say it already...I don't miss that place.

I personally don't think it's the radiators. It's the quality (or lack thereof) of the insulation. Our house (rental) desperately needs new windows and as a result is VERY drafty. And the letterbox thingy is broken and so a draft comes in that way too. But if you stuff a towel in the letterbox opening and close the curtains it gets very warm, very fast.

You could be right.  When I was a kid, my parents didn't seem concerned about insulation - it was fairly cheap to heat the house.  Then, the 70's and fuel price increases hit and everyone started insulating and buying wood burning stoves!

Possibly, it's the same here, especially since one hears about how the winters used to be colder.  We have single-glazed, need-to-be replaced windows as well that the landlord will only replace when they rot out of their frames...maybe...

You walk from our den which is an icebox into the living room which we call the sweatbox. We have double paned windows but they don't seem to help much in the colder rooms. And If you close the doors in the back bathroom you will surely bake to death but in our front bathroom we have to run a little electric heater or you'll freeze when you take a bath/shower.

Our insulation is all jacked up. 

I'm back in the US and living in a period property that had heat installed in the 1950s. But not upstairs. We moved in during a frigid week and had no portable heaters. I froze my bippy off as my bedroom is upstairs. Fortunately, my boys are always hot so they did ok in fleece pjs. We now have portable radiators up there. The rest of the house does have radiators but the kitchen is cold because the door is too drafty.

Unfortunately, our radiators are oil fired and oil ain't cheap. We're looking into other ways to heat/cut costs. We have a fireplace so that could become a primary heat source soon.

I personally don't think it's the radiators. It's the quality (or lack thereof) of the insulation. Our house (rental) desperately needs new windows and as a result is VERY drafty

That's exactly the problem with my flat (also rental).  The bedroom window is so old that the glass is noticeably thicker at the bottom than the top. The doors won't fit properly in the doorframes, so there is a lot of space between the door and the doorframes, so the cold air from outside goes directly into the rooms.

We have a 1900 house here in the UK but it has great radiators (thank goodness, or my laundry would never be dry).  It has double glazed windows and seems to hold the heat pretty well.  Our heating bills are generally lower than our friends' bills.  I set the temp low (16), but I don't do the on/off thing except at night.  Our upstairs tends to be warmer than the downstairs but it's not dramatically different.

Camascato, if you have one room that's getting really hot, can you shut off the valve to that radiator?

Camascato, if you have one room that's getting really hot, can you shut off the valve to that radiator?

Yeah, the radiators all have adjustable valves on them, so we just turn that one down to a resonable level.  It's just strange to me that they're all on the same system, but one of them is capable of putting out a lot more heat than any of the others. 

Carl

Our old house was just a cold house.  I couldn't really warm up in it unless I had the fire going in the front room. 

In our current rental house, our downstairs is cold, but I think the glass patio doors we have let air in.  The upstairs is toasty. 

I grew up in a house built in the early 1900s, and we had old cast iron radiators that worked wonderfully.  I hate forced air, especially the newer types.  For most of my pre-teen and early teenage years my parents used a woodstove, which they have recently begun to use again.  They took out the cast iron radiators and switched to baseboard during the period they didn't use the stove.

It isn't because it was the US.  It was because it was a necessity to have reliable heating and insulation.  For example, I just spoke to my parents and they told me that it was -25.5 c last night (-14 f) not factoring in the windchill.  When you live in a climate like that, you either live in a few rooms of your house during the winter (like my friend who owns an old farmhouse with a wood furnace and woodstoves), or you insulate and have powerful furnaces/boilers.  Or I guess you learn to love high gas/oil/electric bills.

I live in an old period building here with giant windows and nosebleed ceilings.  It's cold, but being a period masonry building, it's impractical to expect anything else.  If climate change hits here harder, I imagine that you will find more people double glazing, bigger furnaces, closing off areas of their houses, and/or using pellet stoves. 

We have a little oil radiator in our room.  I would have moved out if we didn't have a secondary heater.  The boiler is new, but there is no way that we can expect it to heat up a building this size.

The coldest house I've lived in was also a period house in the US.  It faced Lake Erie and had the original windows.  While it doesn't get as cold there as where I grew up, the wind off the lake would blow a lot of the heat out, even with the storm windows in.  I'd wake up some mornings and could see my breath.  It wasn't a priority for our landlord, so we froze.  Once the building heated up after the boiler ran a lot for a few days, we'd walk around in tshirts and shorts.  We had absolutely no control of our heating.  We could shut our radiators off once it started getting too warm, but we were on the top floor and roasted anyway.

The warmest houses in colder weather (for the most part) are in places with the coldest weather.  There are exceptions of course.

When I lived in Lancashire, back in 1987-88 we were in a flat that was freezing!  Literally.  The sponge in the bath was often frozen!  Brrrr!
And, oh, how I hated the freezing cold toilet seats!

We have the weirdest heat differential in our flat. My office, hubby's office and the bedroom are so hot, we have windows open and have to run a fan at night to sleep. The living room, which is right next to the bedroom is so cold, that day or night, I can see my breath when I walk in. Haven't been able to understand why.

When I lived in Lancashire, back in 1987-88 we were in a flat that was freezing!  Literally.  The sponge in the bath was often frozen!  Brrrr!
And, oh, how I hated the freezing cold toilet seats!

Did you have one of those outside toilets that didn't flush?