It was 2 degrees outside at half past six this morning and 19 in the lounge, which is exactly where the thermostat has sat since the heating went on in October. It stays there. I'm not saying that to be virtuous. Rob and I agreed on 19 a couple of winters ago and I stopped arguing about it. What I've been doing instead, since the clocks went back, is finding the places the heat leaks out of a 1930s semi.
Bleeding the radiators
The engineer who serviced the boiler on 4 October said to bleed the radiators once the heating had been on a few weeks. I did it last Sunday with a £2 key and a folded tea towel. Isla's radiator in the back bedroom was cold across the top, and so was the one under the landing window. Both hissed for about ten seconds, spat a few drops of brown water and went quiet. The pressure gauge on the boiler dipped afterwards, so I topped it back up the way the engineer had shown me. By teatime Isla's room felt as if somebody had given it an extra jumper.
The back of my hand
On Sunday afternoon I walked round the house with the heating on and my hand held out in front of me like someone checking for a ghost. The back of the hand feels a draught better than the palm, and you find far more if you go slowly. Here is what I found:
- The bottom of the front door, where the hall mat moved whenever the wind got up
- The loft hatch on the landing, with a hand-width gap down one side
- The bay window, where the sill meets the glass and the air comes in cold
- The back door, with a gap along the bottom that Rob, who has opinions about letterboxes, says is "worse than the front"
- The cupboard under the stairs, which is basically outside
Rob fitted a £12 draught strip along the bottom of the front door. The first length was too fat and the door wouldn't shut without a shoulder, so he swapped it for the thinner profile from the same pack. There was a bit of foam strip left over, which went round the loft hatch. The bay has the old lined curtains from Linda's front room, brown, 1990s, and heavier than a small child. I draw them at 3:45 when the light goes, and the bay stops feeling like a fridge door. The back door and the under-stairs cupboard are on the list for after Christmas.
What the meter says
I can't prove any of this has saved a penny. The weather is different every day and I'm not a scientist, I'm a woman with a smart meter display on a windowsill. What I can say is that on Saturday, the coldest day so far, the display said we'd used 56 kWh of gas. At 6.1p a unit on our fix that's £3.42, plus 29p for the standing charge. The fix started on 1 November and the direct debit is £142, so the bills sheet is not currently angry with me.
The heating comes on at 5:00 for Rob's early start, goes off at 8:30, and runs again from 3:00 to 9:30. On Thursdays, when I work from home, the house is without heating between 8:30 and 3:00 and I sit at the dining end in a fleece, fingerless gloves and a scarf, with a mug of tea I microwave twice. It isn't glamorous. A hot water bottle on my lap does more than any of the draught-proofing, and I'm not too proud to say so.
The airer tent is up most days now, and Mabel has abandoned the airing cupboard for it. She sits on the warm washing and shows no interest in the draughts I've been chasing. I take that to mean the tent is working, since she's a good judge of warmth.
The bill for all this: £2 for the key, £12 for the strip, nothing for the foam, and the curtains were free. I'll look at January's gas the same way I'd look at a bank statement, and say what I find. For now the thermostat says 19, the lounge says 19, and my hand, held out in the hall on Tuesday night, says a good deal less breeze than it did last Saturday.
