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Comment by alias_neo | Hacker News Reader

Insulation is pretty good in new build flats. I bought a new build in London where I lived for 5 years, I used the heating all of about 10 days in 5 years, the gas bill was a rounding error; what they really need it cooling; that place was 38°C in my living room with all windows and doors open in the summer.

To put that into perspective, I just moved to a 1930s house where I'm paying £600-800 a month for the heating right now.

For the record, I'd rather spend that on heating than live under the absolute racket of London leasehold ever again.

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> that place was 38°C in my living room with all windows and doors open in the summer.

If your window is open you will have the same air temperature as outside, potentially higher. I saw a lot of that in my apartment block this summer. People don't have experience dealing with high temperatures, and intuitions they have are wrong.

What you want to do is

1. Open windows at night to create draft and cool down your dwelling.

2. During the day close windows and block sunlight as much as possible. Blocking sunlight on the outside of window is better than blocking it inside. If blocking inside with something like thermal curtains you may need to leave window a crack open. Sunhouse-like conditions may cause temperature next to window increse by a lot (60+) which is not good for glass.

3. (1) and (2) can be supplemented with AirCon, but it's not that popular in UK.

> that place was 38°C in my living room with all windows and doors open in the summer

You want to leave your windows open at night when it's cooler. Close the windows and curtains in the morning before it starts heating up.

Managed to get through the heatwave last year by doing this.

We had Venetian blinds but they're inside the windows so all of the heat was already inside by the time it hits them, it didn't help much. We don't live there now so we have different problems.

£800 per month? That seems a lot for a family home, even during these times. And that’s only for gas, electricity excluded?

How big is the house and is there zero insulation, eg single pane windows?

Electric heating, man. 800£ is still a lot but I think my 2-person 60m^2 flat is doing about 200£/month in electric with only 3/5 heaters turned on (our bedrooms + lounge). With just these three heaters on it's about 40kWh a day mostly in heating (everything else uses almost nothing).

I can imagine a family with kids where you want the house to be heated all over + much more cooking/washing machine use and you could get to the £500-700 range, but 800 is still definitely a lot.

It's such a cool place here. I just wish Brits would fix their political/cultural problems. They like doing things "the good old way" too much hence political parties cater to those people. Gov should have been looking at this energy crisis thing 20 years ago; it was obvious as all hell. They went all in on gas like the scumbags they are, yeah it'll never run out. Sure.

That figure doesn't even include our electricity usage, which is fairly conservative; we average about 12kWh/day when we're not using electric heating and we're working from home.

It's a 4.5 bed detached; solid walls, suspended floor, large bay windows, some of the double glazing is shot, hard wood floor downstairs, high ceilings, some of the radiators are too small or too oldz some of the piping is too small and not insulated and runs under the house where it's extra cold.

Yes this all needs fixing, yes we working on it, but we only moved in a few months ago, it takes time, and money.

The ~£800 is just for gas and just for heating and that's without having it on enough to be warm most of the time.

When the children aren't home we just use an electric heater in two rooms; we both work from home in our own office spaces.

That's crazy having to spend so much on heating alone, hopefully it gets warmer soon.

Maybe try electric blankets - I've seen ones where you can use them like a poncho - keeping you warm while working. Must be cheaper than having to heat an entire room.

We've gotten some electric blankets for the kids and some heated throws for ourselves, also the weather is a bit milder in the positive single digit range so it's easing up a little for now, but who knows what's to come.

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