How warm to you keep your home?

After watching Home Sick the past few weeks on TV, I was just wondering how warm you keep your home?

I was mortified watching it that families out there don't heat their homes, rather they pile on more clothes then huddle in the cold lounge under a blanket with 'steam' coming out of their mouths.

It made me wonder how warm others keep their homes - our heat pump goes non stop from about 6pm till 8am every day keeping our house about the 20 degree mark.

I just think its more important to have a warm home for my child's health - I am not surprised now, at why we have so many kids out there with Asthma!

mummy_becks wrote: I have however just learnt my lesson about keeping the house too warm as the boys both have chest infections from being in a warm house and going out into the cold.

Oh, I never thought about that. Must rug up child each time she goes outside

Oh, we do have a gas heater but haven't used it this year so far coz now that i have mobile gremlins I don't trust it and I haven't gotten round to buying a guard for it.

We used to huddle in our lounge under blankets to keep warm. This place is freezing cold.

Now with the heatpump, we have it on 18 over night and then went I get home I turn it up to 22 degrees. It's on 24/7.

i agree with you mummybecks - that show tends to be a bit exaggerated!!!

i have no idea what temperature the house is, but we have two dehumydifers running 24/7, one convection heater and one large oil heater going overnight and during the day when im home.

Well as you may have read in my other post, this is a contenscious (sp) issue for me.  We have the fire going all day and the lounge slowly heats up from 13 when we wake to 20 in the evening.  At the moment it is taking most of the day to crank up (and helped by the afternoon sun).  It is a huge room and even though we have moved down to one end we arent able to block off the other....frustrating.

Tom's room is kept at a minimum of 15 (thats wiht a heater on high over night.  Turn that heater down and the temp drops quickly).  All this is leading to unsustainable power bills.  We need to look at alternatives.

 

We freeze in our room and use 2 duvets (but my little mini incubator is kicking in and I wake really hot even though it is freezing).

 

Outside temp is about 0-3 overnight.

I beleive there are those who have to huddle under blankets as that happens in our house... thankfully not to the extent our breath is visiable though.

Our house is only about 24-25years old so theoretically has insulation but from what we can gather it's only the paper insulation kind and not bats etc... our ceileing follows the slope of the roof so we have the bare minimal roof-space which isn't enough to get up there and put some in ourselves.

As for heating, well, no in built system in our house, just a wee two bar electric heater that boosts the temp a bit in our open paln lounge/dining/kitchen, hence the blankets when on the couch watching TV - we shut off the bedrooms, hallway etc so they're not heated at all (apart from electric blanket on the bed)... I do battle my DH a bit on this as I feel the cold and he doesn't so it's not so important to him and I'm often told to toughen up!

I do realise when we finally have a baby that things will need a re-think; we are looking into heating and insulation options now, it's just cost is a biggie, so in the meantime, huddling under a blanket it is.

We don't have pink batts in our place, we discovered when we had all the issues with teh roof recently that the only insulation here is insul-fluff in the ceiling But for some reason, the house still seems to hold it's warmth.

Our last place was freeeeeezing! It was a 1930's wooden bungalow with gappy wooden joinery, I used to lie in bed at night and watch the blinds banging on the window coz the draft was so bad. And of course coz it had blinds, not curtains, the heat escaped like mad, and it had wooden floors and a huge glass conservatory, it was like living in a fridge!

kebakat wrote: Have you guys considered getting some insulation pumped in?

Yeah, we've been to a couple of home show, expo thingies getting ideas and are looking into options of getting foam stuff pumped in - just budget isn't allowing us to do it any time in the near future

We are actually thinking of putting our house forward for the next series of Homesick if they make one... but not having children just yet we prolly wouldn't get picked!

Our place is 1980's so it's not as cold as probably any of yours who have posted on here - thankfully! We run the heater on and off but usually just before breakfast and after supper. We get all day sun in our upstairs lounge and it holds it pretty well. The bedrooms are cooler, but I don't like the idea of heaters in children's bedrooms so we go without. We all have a woolen blanket and duvet on top at nights.