So at work today, the discussion of household heating and gas/electricity bills came up (entering winter Down Under), and I commented that we have our central heating set to 14 Celsius (approx 57 Freedoms) overnight, and off during the day/evening. We find that 14 is quite comfortable under a fluffy doona/duvet. I was warmly mocked (well natured), and informed that something closer to 24C (75F) is appropriate, day and night.
Surely not… right?
18C . We live in a condo building that is well insulated so setting it any lower wouldn’t help. I agree, it’s preferable to sleep when it’s cooler. 24C in winter is insane - if you’re cold just put on a jersey or a fleece.
Ahh how I wish for good insulation! Empty walls and breezy windows for us. How very grateful we are that Australian winters are mild 😬
If I set my winter evening thermostat to 14C my wife would have my head on a spike in the front lawn. Police be damned.
We keep it at 22C as a compromise during the day and 19 at night (since we sleep better in the cold).
Hahaha twenty-two?! I fear I may not know that feeling again until October!
24C, that’s insane!
During winter we try to keep the daytime temperature around 20-21C in the rooms we use the most, and a couple of degrees cooler in other rooms. We find it important to not have a too large temperature difference between rooms in order to avoid mold growing.
During nighttime we set the thermostats to 16-17C.
I don’t know if our doors seal well enough to maintain any kind of temperature differential between rooms. I had never considered the consequences! It’s kinda humid around the hills though, so we keep windows open during the day to keep fresh air moving around, even during winter (Southern Australia)
I live offgrid in a campervan and do not have HVAC in the normal sense. I follow mild weather, aiming for daily highs of 65-70deg F. Because I camp in arid regions this usually means overnight lows of 35-45F. I try to avoid overnight freezes for comfort and to protect my water system.
My roof vent is set to 65F (comes on then and tries to hold that temp). The LiFePO4 battery bank is warmed to 50F. At night I use an electric blanket and dogbuddy to stay warm if needed.
what you’re doing is what I want to do - do you have any suggestions for links to/communities on lemmy or other federated platforms? liked vandwellers back on reddit a lot but cant find something similar here.
my rig is a 1987 Ford/Grumman Kabmaster, it’s been in the shop for a while now.
Not OP but I haven’t found one yet (though I haven’t looked exhaustively). I think it would be popular if you made a community though!
VanLife, Teardrop trailers…
ok, here ya go, a lemmy community for vanfolk, car-dwellers, RVers, etc
Thanks!
We have our thermostat set to 63°F in the winter. We’ll go up to 67°F or so if there’s a storm bad enough that power loss is possible.
In the summer, we have our air conditioners set to 70°F.
Interesting idea, banking some heat ahead of a storm. We regularly lose power here, but not for any significant length of time (minutes, not hours or days)
We rarely lose power also, but it’s happened and we’d rather have the house warmer just in case.
The last time we lost heat was due to a problem with our heater. It happened during a particularly cold day and our house temperature was dipping quickly. We have a little parakeet (Dewey) who can’t handle cold weather so we had to get someone to fix it quickly and needed to put heaters in his room to keep the temperature up in there.
Thankfully, they fixed it relatively quickly and Dewey was fine.
24 seems insane to me, that is way beyond uncomfortably warm. At night I’m pretty sure that’s just unhealthy.
I tend to keep temperature around 16-18 degrees celsius in the winter during the day, never had a thermostat that allowed setting a target temp so it fluctuates. 16 is alright with double or thick socks and a sweater even when i sit around at my pc. At night I just turn off the heat and open the window, it gets cold but it’s comfortable in a blanket.
In the US south . . . just happy to get to turn the AC off for 6-8 weeks lol
24C is bonkers
Hahaha not sure where you are exactly, but my memory of Houston and Corpus Christi involves using my arms to swim through the air - the heat and humidity was suffocating; the air was so thick! Sunglasses fogging up instantly when you step outside from an air-conditioned room.
We regularly see 110F here Down Under in our south, but it’s a dry heat. You can at least spend the day outside getting stuff done.
Your memory is very good. We are 100+ this week with that humidity, it is brutal outside. I’ll take the dry heat/cold any day, Australia/NZ is on my travel list!
Ouch, you can keep that! Hit me up if you’re ever near Melbourne; we’ll take you for a walk through Sherbrooke Forest; if you’re here at this time of year, you enjoy cold mornings, and you’re very lucky - you may even get to hear a lyrebird song - imitating every other native bird in the forest! 😀
I keep 18.5°C during the day in the floor I work (fully remote so I’m sitting at the desk all day long) and off at night
That sounds like a good productive temperature 😀 I must admit, I run a little foot heater during the mornings at work (office, onsite) to defrost my extremities!
I have one of those too
Mine stays set between 68F and 72F year round, adjusting depending on if I’m hot or cold. My dad was always one to set the thermostat based on cost and I refuse to be that way.
68-72F during the day
60-63F at night
In the winter, I’ll accept 23C anything colder and I catch a cold.
I think we would have to set fire to our curtains to sustain 23C in here… that’s crazy talk! Y’all run around in socks and underpants? lol
Even at 23C I still need to wear a sweater, at least 2 layers of pants, double socks, a beanie, and I always have a blanket wrapped around me along with a mini space heater directed at my feet. The only reason it’s not hotter is due to the person I live with.
If you hadn’t specified, I would have sworn that, with your vivid description, you must have been talking about 23 Farenheit. On a 23C day, I would be in the garden in short-sleeves soaking up the heat! Hahaha
That’s not how colds work. Cold weather can reduce the immune system, but it doesn’t cause colds. You still need to be exposed to a virus to catch a cold. Also, it’s not like colder weather guarantees your body can’t fight off a cold.
It’s much easier (and cheaper) to heat a small space (a person wearing a sweater) versus heating an entire room.
Tell that to my body. From my own personal experience when the temperature drops below 23C I get a cold, simple as that and temperature has been the only fluctuating variable. So while the cold may not be the direct cause it’s a big enough influence for me that I’d rather not take my chances.
My house is set to 22 in the morning and switches off at about 11am otherwise the house is too warm at bed time. I have ‘cold’ friends who keep their house much colder so there seems to be a range of preferences.
It is summer here, so our night temp is set to 21C and daytime temp is set to 24C. If we’re away, the AC will turn off.
In winter, I think we keep the house at 18C at night and maybe 19-20C during the day. Our eco mode minimum is set to 15C so the pipes don’t freeze.
I also prefer cooler, but we set our temps in a way to save on our electric bill.
I’m in Canada and we definitely couldn’t just turn off our furnace in the winter - things start exploding when it is -30C or lower.
69F all year baby 😎
Sorry I only know Americans. In in the south so it can get warm. In the summer we set the air conditioning to cool down to 78 F (25.5C) when we are home (82F, 28C when we are out) during the winter we set the heat to 62 F (16.6C), but down to 60F at night.
