Free Heats

A normal person would just install a programmable thermostat, set the nighttime setting and the workday/school day setting to 55 degrees and the breakfast rush hour and evenings to 70 degrees and be done with it. Since I am seldom described as normal, I forgo the programmable settings and instead fiddle with the thermostat through the day. Too much time on my hands? I try to recognize “free heats” and incorporate them into my 24-hour schedule. What follows is a description of what passes for a normal late November day.

The thermostat is set at 50-55 degrees while we sleep under heavy blankets at night. Two free heats are at work during the night. First is our body heat, the heat that the rest of the animal kingdom relies on. Second, is ambient heat given off by the refrigerator and the freezer. Sometimes my wife will cook something overnight in a slow cooker crock pot and this adds to ambient heat in the house. At higher thermostat settings ambient heat is not very effective in reducing utility bills but in the lower ranges it is a balancing factor which goes a long way in keeping the furnace from kicking in. A cool house is also a win for the fridge and freezer since they don’t need to work as hard. Comfort is the major concern and we do sleep better in a cool house than in a warm one.

When the alarm goes off, I get up, turn up the thermostat and start the coffee maker. The lights and heating coffee are more ambient heat. My wife gets up to take her bath (we leave the water in the tub until it cools) and uses the hair dryer to dry her hair (more ambient heat.) I make breakfast using the toaster, electric range and microwave. Even though we pay for the electricity for each of these appliances their usage was for a main purpose other that warming the house and so the extra heat produced is simply a beneficial spinoff byproduct.

When my wife heads off to her job, I turn the thermostat back down, dress in comfortable layers and go outdoors for an hour morning walk and then an hour of yard work. Exercise generated free body heat is totally underrated and underappreciated. By the time I return to the house, that same house that had felt cool when I went outside now feels uncomfortably hot until some body heat dissipates.

Once I have cooled from my morning exertion, I make a cup of hot tea and go out onto the front porch to enjoy it. The cup warms my hands while the tea warms my body core. If it is sunny the front sun porch will be quite cozy with free passive solar heat which I share begrudgingly with the cat dozing in a sunbeam on the porch swing. Once the porch heats up warmer than the house I simply open the front door and let the porch heat enter the house; the furnace won’t kick in once. On really cold cloudy days I can go to the library to read or net surf on their computers to get free public heat until it’s time for my wife to return home. Hard as it may be to believe, I am not totally averse to taking an afternoon nap on our couch if I don’t go for the free public heat.

When my wife returns from work we again turn up the thermostat but this is partially offset by the heat from the evening meal, the TV or computer, the lighting and maybe a load of laundry in the dryer. Beware, if you own a gas clothes dryer never try to vent the excess heat into the house. If you own an electric clothes dryer and really, really read up on safety issues you may be able to safely get away with venting part of excess dryer heat indoors.

Besides being aware of and utilizing the free heats (body, ambient, passive solar, and public) another concept to keep utilities down is micro space heating. Simply heat the room with the thermostat in it with a safe space heater and the stupid thermostat will think that the whole house is warm and not kick the furnace on. I spend most of my time in the living room anyway so why keep the whole house warm. Beware again; never shut or block room heating vents; it will destroy your furnace. Just fool the thermostat instead with a space heater.

In the evening we again set the heat down to 50 degrees and hit the sack. That concludes a normal day in the life of an abnormal man. Like I said, most people would just install a programmable thermostat.