Beat the Cold and the Fuel Crisis 7

And save the planet.

Halogen bulbs are better than LEDs.
Showers, not baths.
Dry your clothes outside, not in the tumble-dryer.

(All from BBC Breakfast)

Dust lightbulbs.
Turn off the heating when you go out.
Office buildings to turn off lights at night.
Leave curtains and blinds open until the sun goes down to take advantage of natural light and warmth.

Don't heat empty rooms: turn off the radiator in the spare room and close the curtains. Keep the door shut, too.

(from The Times)

Tips from Twitter

Things I learned from working in -10°F on loading docks:

Scarves/Keeping your neck warm does a LOT to keep you warm.
Wear 2 pairs of socks & tuck your pants (trousers) in between the layers of socks.
Tuck your sleeves into your gloves.
No hat? Get a long scarf & wrap it like a hijab.

Learn to crochet:

Wrist warmers
Shrugs
Hug-me-tights
Shawls

What to wear:

Corsets
Fine vests and spencers
Waistcoats that hug your ribs
Stockings under trousers
Scarves and snoods
Silk scarves, shirts, vests
Socks on your hands at night
Furry ear warmers (very fashionable in the mid-60s)
Long silk underwear
Fine wool long vest and long-leg knickers. Tuck the vest into the knickers.
Tuck your top into your skirt or trousers.

Fill the bath with hot water and leave the bathroom door open.

Wear a nightcap, don’t drink one.

Slippers and shoes with thick soles – platform shoes keep you off cold pavements and out of the snow.

Old dinner jackets are warm, says @zi6qa. And stylish!

Paper can be used as insulation, says @jaredmshearer. Over or under your vest?

Cardboard insoles make a difference – but commercial insoles are better and sheepskin are best.

Tuck your shirt in. Tuck trousers into socks.

Make mittens by cutting the toes off socks and making a thumb hole. Bind the edges.

Don't throw out that moth-eaten cashmere jumper – cut off the sleeves to use as wrist warmers.

Insulate knitwear with a big plaid shirt over the top – or an emergency poncho. A bin bag with a head hole and arm holes would probably perform the same function. They can also be used as rainwear.

Line hand-knits with taffeta.

Pyjama trousers under jeans, suggests @szetoinsitu.

And change out of damp clothes, says the BBC's Morning Live.

Keep changing your socks. Wear two pairs.

At home, get up and move around every hour.

Instead of turning on the central heating:

Check your fire and carbon monoxide alarms.

DO NOT start a fire in your house unless you have a chimney, warns @OSTBear. He also points out that candles emit heat as well as light.

If the electricity has gone off but you have a gas cooker, keep a pan of water boiling on the stove. (Make sure it doesn’t boil dry.)

Plug in your slow cooker in the living room.

Divide up open-plan rooms with thick drapes, or room dividers. Rebuild that wall you "knocked through". French style glass doors between the rooms will conserve heat while letting in light.

Put a candle in a clay pot and it will radiate heat.

Fool your brain with a “crackling fire” video, says @Lisaffect.

Clip fine blankets to your curtains with clothes pegs, says @thunderratz. Or use beach towel clips intended to clip your towel to your deck chair.

Electric throws are cheaper than heaters [but check for safety!!!!], and space heaters are cheaper than central heating. Heat the person, not the room – or house.

Don’t block radiators with furniture. Stick foil behind radiators and fix a shelf above them to reflect and retain the heat.

Keep internal doors closed. If anyone leaves a door open, shout “Were you born in a barn?” Or "Shut that door!" If you have arches instead of doors, hang curtains or "portieres".

Put rugs down on those fashionable bare boards and laminate floors. (To clean, hang them over a washing line and beat with a carpet beater. Warmer now?)

In a two-storey house, live upstairs (heat rises), or fix up a thick curtain between downstairs and upstairs – or box in the stairs and put a door at the bottom.

Avoid external walls, or insulate them with blankets hung as tapestries. Or bookcases – books do furnish a room. If you have no books, buy in bulk from charity shops. You may even start to read!

Families and flatmates congregate in one room.

Ten pigs give out as much heat as a single-bar fire! Copy Yorkshire farmers and keep cows downstairs. Or take a hint from the Irish and Scots and keep your animals down one end of your bothy. Sleep on a mezzanine floor above them. Or be like the Russians and heat the house with a big porcelain stove on which you all sleep.

Put a screen round the front door.

Hang curtains over all doors.

Bring back the "room divider".

After cooking, leave the oven door open, advises @OllyWrites.

Build a bonfire in the garden with that wood you liberated from skips. You can even cook on it! Sausages in a roasting tin; chestnuts and jacket potatoes in foil, in the embers.

Heat the person, not the space. (Room heaters, electric blankets or even slankets.)

Huddle over a heat source, as your parents and grandparents advised you NOT to do.

Sleeping arrangements:

If you don’t have a hot water bottle or wheat bag, fill a glass lemonade etc bottle with hot water and wrap it in a towel or jumper. Improvise a wheat bag from a sock and some raw rice.

Turn your bed into a four-poster and dress it with a thick tester (roof) and curtains. Use quilted fabric.

If you run out of bedclothes, use bathtowels and coats. If staying in a hotel, demand more blankets than the single one they hide somewhere in the room.

And you can always sleep with all your clothes on. Curling up is warmer than stretching out.

If you have dogs and cats, pile them on your bed.

Share your bed with as many other people as possible – all at the same time.

Pick a high bed, not a divan – or pallet. An old-fashioned valance will insulate the space underneath and obviate cold draughts. Or fill the space with suitcases.

Flannelette sheets and duvet covers keep in the heat. You can have as many duvets as you like and even sleep ON one – or two. Tuck the duvet round you, not under the mattress. Partners – adopt individual duvets.

Put a blanket under your sheet, or on top of your sheet and sleep on it. Put another one between you and the duvet. Layer blankets with newspapers in between.

Invest in a sleeping bag designed for Himalayan expeditions. Wear while working from home and watching TV.

Pitch a tent in your living room, blow up your lilo, don your sleeping bag and crawl inside with your hotwater bottle. Zip up the tent from the inside.

Some recommend putting the tent on your bed and sleeping in it.

Build a Scottish box bed in a corner of the room.

“Blanket forts are great,” says @eveiswurzig. (Made from blankets and clothes rails, or a blanket draped over a table. Mattress on the floor, whole family huddles.)

You can build something similar to work in.

If you lose power, sleep together with your children in the middle and layer blankets over and under everyone, says Lee in Iowa.

During the day:

Wrap yourself in a space blanket as you work.

Insulate your typing chair – throw a coat over the back.

Keep moving. Housework warms you up!

Wrap yourself in a spare duvet.

Make soup – it's also cheap.

Boil water and keep it in a thermos to save boiling the kettle constantly. Or fill the thermos with tea.

Invade the second homes of rich people, suggests @hanikamiya.

Window treatments:

There are many cheap ways of insulating windows – plastic, bubble wrap, cardboard, rubbish bags – but have you thought of using an emergency blanket? 

Install blinds as well as curtains and draw both.

Hang thermal curtains.

Install external shutters.

Use a pool noodle cut in half lengthways as a draught excluder, recommends @nivahiem. Or find a 1970s pattern for a draught excluder in the shape of a corduroy dachshund.

Build a broch – an ancient Scottish castle with double walls (see above). Or a beehive hut as dwelt in by the monks of Skellig Michael, an Irish island in the Atlantic. 

Already firms are ceasing to heat foyers. Will we go back to the 40W bulb in the hall? The five-inch, tepid bath? 

On trains, shut the door after you. They're probably automatic now, but I once spent an entire chilly train journey getting up and shutting the door between carriages as people passed through – and didn't shut the door after them. I also spent a freezing journey wrapped in sheets of newspaper. The Good Old Days!

In a café, pick a seat near the back instead of scowling at thoughtless customers who leave the door open. Sorry to spoil your fun.

More here, and links to the rest.

Beat the Cold 5

 

Caro Stow-Crat here with some more tips on beating the cold now so many of us are working at home, energy prices are rising and some people are forced to choose between "heat or eat".

Replace the Tudoresque wood wall-panelling an earlier generation ripped out – good insulation!

Build on a porch. If this isn’t possible, build a glassed-in porch inside your front door. If you can't do this, a folding screen might protect you from draughts. That's what screens were for – not dressing modestly behind.

Hang a thick curtain inside the front door, like the Victorians. It should reach the floor – you can buy purpose-made lead weights for the hem.

Position a high-backed settle on either side of an open fire or heat source.

Crochet yourself a woollen shawl from a Victorian pattern. (For Civil War style, search for "sontag".)

Or get a plug-in heated cape to wear while working.

Make sure your “core” is warm – why do you think toffs wear body warmers? Don a vest and a waistcoat, or one of those ageing sleeveless jerseys.

Twitter recommends padded gilets, thermal leggings, thick socks and sheepskin slippers. 
Also padded housecoats.

Put down some rugs on your painstakingly restored bare boards. Again, like the Victorians.

Protect your feet indoors with sheepskin slippers.

Drink a nice cup of hot tea. For real builders’ tea, use two teabags.

Wrap yourself in a blanket or duvet. Put a blanket over your knees.

Affectionate dogs, cats and children make great hotwater bottles. Or get some of those wheat bags you heat up in the microwave. (Mind you don't heat them too hot and burn yourself.)

If you have some old-fashioned stone hot-water bottles, fill them with sand or salt and heat them in the oven. Again, take care!

Bring back bed jackets, bedsocks – and nightcaps!

More here, and links to the rest.

Beat the Cold (and Heat) 4

Matinee jacket

Turning up the heat in most English houses, or to be more precise, turning it on, simply isn’t done. (Florence King, Wasp, Where Is Thy Sting?)

You don’t open your window on a January night until you are ready to dive into bed and pull the clothes about you. (Anna Where Are You, Patricia Wentworth When did Upwards stop sleeping in a room with an open window in January????)

Other people’s houses are so cold. (Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence)

British homes are kept far warmer than they were 30 years ago, says somebody who suggests shivering keeps you slim (Jan 2014). You try it.

Brits really are supposed to keep a stiff upper lip and pretend that they don’t feel heat or cold or pain or tiredness or hunger or thirst or calls of nature, and they mustn’t do anything to make themselves more comfortable, even if the solution is easy, simply and obvious – like fanning yourself, or sitting on the grass, or moving nearer to a fire. (According to 19th century novels, entitled middle-aged middle-class men stood in front of an open fire warming themselves and blocking the heat from everybody else.)

In the 30s, you couldn’t wear a fur coat, or any coat, indoors, but you were allowed to wear a fur stole over your sleeveless, backless evening dress which you wore (over an “opera-top” woollen vest and knickers) in frigid English drawing rooms. That was when “everybody” dressed for dinner, but didn’t have the blazing fires that made the thin evening dresses possible. (You were also allowed to wear something called a “coatee” or a “matinee jacket”.)

I remember going to a cocktail party in a vicarage in the 60s and standing around chatting in a room that felt like an industrial fridge. Why were Upward houses so cold in the 50s, 60s, 70s? They hadn’t installed central heating because it was “American” (ie too expensive). If they did install it, it was always off because it was too expensive to run.

Victorian houses were heated only by open fires, but the Victorians managed to be quite cosy because they wore so many clothes. In the 30s Upwards cast off restricting Victorian spencers and combinations – and shivered. They wore nylon stockings and thin shoes in the winter. It would have been sensible to wear huge ski jerseys, thick stockings, hats and fingerless gloves indoors, but as always, they were afraid of looking different. (While thinking they were wacky individualists and exhorting everyone to “Be yourself!”)

During WWII Upwards were forced to become more practical, and were encouraged to knit woollen vests and knickers. (Was baby wool unrationed?) Strangely, lace-trimmed long knickers in jazzy colours trended in the short-skirted 60s and were seized on with joy by chilly Upwards. That was just before tights took over from nylons.

In the 50s and 60s, if you said “I’m cold”, someone would say loudly: “Well, put on a thick jersey!” Because they couldn’t possibly say “I’m not turning on any form of heating because it costs money”.

French writer Agnès Poirier is appalled that the English set their central heating to go off for several hours a day. At one lunch party, it got very cold at about 3pm and we all asked if we could have some heat. The host said “The central heating will come on again at 4pm.” We said “Well, can you turn it on now?” And he said rather crossly “It will come on again at 4!” Of course, he didn’t know how to override the timer, but couldn’t admit it. And didn’t have any other form of heating.

When do you turn on your heating? How long do you “hold out” and “resist the temptation” before you finally “succumb”? Oil is expensive! October 1 seems to be the official date. Upwards with oil-fired central heating and a wood-burning stove in the sitting room are like people who had an open fire in one room and no heating anywhere else (back in the Good Old Days).

The trouble with central heating – it’s either OFF or ON. In the slightly more recent days you could turn on individual radiators. Perhaps Upwards should reinvent this useful feature. Or uncover the fireplace, sweep the chimney, and build a fire. They might find themselves sitting round it and, who knows, they might even talk to each other. Humans have lived around fires since Prometheus gave us the secret – a room without even a fake fireplace seems disorganised and unfocused.

Lady Dedlock’s fireplace was “closed in by night with broad screens, and illumined only in that part”. (Dickens, Bleak House) Lady D managed to turn her huge, formal drawing room back into a cave.

Jen Teale has a wall-mounted electric fire with Optiflame log effect. Or a free-standing fire with a slate effect hearth pad and chrome effect surround. Or else she stuffs an antique-style electric fire into a Victorian fireplace. Bohemian Arkana keeps warm by a bonfire in the back garden.

When it pours, Jen and Eileen wear packaway plastic capes with hoods. Jen stores her “tote” collapsible umbrella in the fabric cover it came in. (Everybody else throws them away.) Very Bohemian Rowena wears an umbrella hat. Her husband wears giant glasses with windscreen wipers.

The heat, the flies...
English people still look askance if you fan yourself in public. Fanning yourself with a programme or magazine is just about OK – but an actual fan, made for the purpose? You can collect fans, you can display them on your walls, but you can’t fan yourself with one. And if you fan yourself with a programme, others may tolerate it for a while, but eventually they will tell you it’s distracting or  noisy. Really, of course, you are doing something that isn’t “done” by middle-class English people, and hence you are drawing attention to yourself. And your companions are going to be damned by association.

When the sun shines, Rowena wears a pink coolie hat from a seaside pound shop. Arkana wears a coolie hat from Kalimantan made of natural materials – she bought it on the spot. But these days you can get almost anything on the internet – it has put those old Stoke Newington travellers out of business. And next year Rowena goes to Kalimantan and buys a native hat made of instant coffee packaging. They’re more rainproof! She also has a lot of colourful baskets woven out of telephone cables by Africans.

More here, and links to the rest.

Beat the Cold III

Hi darlings, Caroline Stow-Crat here! I'm sure you've read my handy tips for beating the cold by now. And my friend Samantha has some ideas, though you might find them a bit grim!

Anyway, I've had some more thoughts (or nicked them from the lovely Jonathan Foyle), and here they are:

To track down the source of draughts, take a lit candle and see where it flickers.
Floorboards lose a lot of heat – insulation seal between the gaps can save £25 a year. (Or put down more rugs. Layer them – valuable at the bottom, cheaper on top – so it doesn’t matter if people walk on them in muddy boots.)

(Both from the Sunday Times.)

Jonathan Foyle has some tips on how to weatherproof a stately home/historic house. Move garden statues inside, or wrap them in sacking/lagging. You could even knit them a cosy, or dress them in your old clothes… All this and more here.

And as well as wood panelling, books floor to ceiling are really good insulation. Get a little man to build the shelves, then pick up a load of books from your local Oxfam. Or get your friends to donate!

Bye till next time!

More here:

Beat the Cold III
Beat the Cold II (the Upward way)
Heat-saving Tips II