New Cold House

We moved into the new, furnace-free house over the weekend. Utter chaos here, boxes everywhere, the usual. Detailed updates coming soon. This morning it's 29ºF outside, 58º in the kitchen (post oatmeal-and-coffee making). We're making do with a couple electric space heaters, ticking away on "low". Back soon.

Toilet Heaters, Personal "Offsets"

Back when I first wrote about the heat-wasting properties of toilets, I made a joke about "toilet-tank-water heaters", a device so inane it could not possibly exist. However, I was later notified that such a device does exist-- its purpose is to cure "problem condensation" on the toilet tank in summertime. The idea is that by mixing a percentage of hot water into the toilet tank, you prevent the sides of the tank from becoming cooler than room temperature after a flush, and thence prevent moisture from precipitating, dripping down, and causing problems. (In case you think I'm making this up, here's an article on how to install one, from This Old House.) Of course, this magic comes at a price: unless you have solar hot water, you're probably burning some sort of fossil fuel to supply hot water to the toilet tank. In summer.

Of course I was horrified to learn that people do this, doubly horrified when I learned that some of my own friends were already doing it, and triply horrified when I learned that another set of friends are installing the gizmos during their current bathroom remodel. To be fair, these last friends had a real problem. They live in Vermont, where it is fairly humid in the summer, and they do not use air conditioning, so their house is not artificially dehumidified. Moreover they have well water, which is very cold entering the house, and unlike many New Englanders they do not have a cellar-- so there is no long stretch

Heroes Of The Cold House, #2: Simon, Damiana and Lulu Hare

You don't know them, but the Hares are planning to get through this winter in Boston with no active heating at all. If they succeed, that's 59 days of furnace-use better than we were able to do at the Cold House last winter. They do have some things going for them: for one, they've built a house specifically for the purpose, super-insulated and ultra-tight with counter-current ventilation heat exchangers and other high-tech-ness (here, we don't even have insulation in the ceiling yet... but you know, we did pretty good still.) For another advantage, they live 85 miles south (every little bit helps there.) But still, it's going to be an impressive feat.

The comments on the Boston Globe article linked above are worth reading. Many people think they are endangering the life of their child; some threatened to call DHS. Relax, people. I grew up sleeping in an unheated third-floor bedroom in Boston. Until I was five or six, it didn't have so much as a ventilation grate to the less-cold room below. It was frigid in there. But I survived. And moved north.

Anyway, way to go Hares. I hope I'll be able to find some follow-up about your experiences this winter.

"Freeze Yer Buns"

If you've been following along with the Cold House idea, and you think you'd like to try it out a bit, but you need some motivation/company, you might consider signing on with the "Freeze Yer Buns Challenge" over at Crunchy Chicken. After November 7th we here at Cold House Journal won't even have a thermostat anymore, but we'll be playing along with the Challenge as best we can!

Silly "Green" Products, Part I

Here's a silly "green" product, sold by a major "green" retailer whose catalog arrived in the mail yesterday:


This is basically a 25¢ plastic tray, sold for $16, which holds water. It alleges to "sustainably" "save your home" from "parched winter air."

My critique: Firstly, my home does not need to be saved from being "parched". What part of the house is damaged by dry air? Perhaps they mean save the home's inhabitants from being parched-- in that case, I refer the reader to last year's posts discussing why it is not winter that causes air to feel dry-- it is over-heating the house (here, here, and here.) Yes, if you insist on a hot house in winter, you will parch yourself. So you should turn down the thermostat, rather than buy gadgets to add artificial humidity to artificially hot air.

Heroes Of The Cold House, #1: Dan Sullivan

Last month the mayor of Anchorage, Alaska, Dan Sullivan, announced the launch of a "three-tiered alert system" designed to conserve natural gas in the event the city faces a sudden shortfall in supply during the winter (which, for various reasons, is apparently not all that improbable.) Under the scheme, the usual status is "Green", in which residents may feel free to use/waste as much gas as they like. Should a "Yellow Alert" be announced, however, residents are asked to (voluntarily) turn their thermostats down to 65º (!!), turn their heated garages down to 40º (!!), and reduce the temperature of their hot water. If things get really dire, there could be a "Red Alert", at which time "thermostats should be set to 60 degrees" and "household activities should be consolidated into as few rooms as possible".

Here at the Cold House, we spent pretty much all of last winter under a state of "Red Alert" (with the exception that we didn't turn off our hot water) and were none the worse for it. In fact most of our house was well below 60º, most of the time. As you may remember, we turned our large-ish kitchen into a semi-insulated "bunker", in which we did most of our living. Our bedrooms and bathrooms were essentially unheated. We had the hot water turned off altogether for about 20 hours of each day.

Toilets, Fridges, Heat

The other day Housemate came to me and said, "You aren't doing that 'if it's yellow, let it mellow' thing again, are you?" So I see it's time for my annual diatribe against the heat-wasting effects of winter toilet-flushing (here's last year's).

I thought this year it might be instructive to compare the (unknown-to-most) evil of winter toilet-flushing to the (extremely well-known) evil of "letting all the cold air out of the refrigerator." I am sure almost all of you can remember standing in front of an open fridge looking for a particular item, while a parent, a spouse, or maybe even the voice inside your own head says "Hey! Don't let all the cold air out of the fridge! You're wasting energy!"

So let's look at this with hard data. Which wastes more heat-- swapping out the fridge air for room-temp air, or flushing the toilet? Write your answer here before you read on: ________________