Winter gets closer and so do those bigger bills that we'll soon have to pay. If you're living in a bigger house/flat with many rooms to heat, how do you 'juggle' with the heating in order to cut the costs? Me, I try not to heat the rooms I don't live in too much - I won't stop the heat completely, that's bad for the walls and pipes, but I do bring it down good since there's no point in heating that space.
We have done several things in the past. In one house we were in, there was only one heating unit and we were sharing the house with others so at night we wanted to keep our door shut. We had an electric blanket and heater (but that's expensive) so we tried some old 'colonial days tricks' and it worked! We nailed a quilt to the sides of the walls and it helped insulate our little room. Also, we went to bed with a knit cap on because heat escapes from your body that way. It sounds silly to some, but saving money in this way is not really that ridiculous and it saved our budget so much that we were able to travel to other countries and help with hurricane relief work. The memories we made doing that far out weigh the pains we took to save money - plus its sort of a funny story.
Believe it or not, I often run my central air in the middle of winter, and very seldom run my heat at all. That's one of the perks of winter time for me, is my heating/cooling bills are super low, so I can save some money. I've been living in apartments since I moved out, so the buildings themselves are already heated and a lot of residual heat makes its way into my apartment whether I like it or not, so even when I have the heat shut off completely in the winter it can often times get really warm and stuffy. In fact, a few of the apartments I lived in had boiler heating systems, which you basically cannot shut off. Even if you turn the thermostat all the way down, the pipes still continue to give off residual heat. Summer on the other hand is a nightmare, as my electric bills are sky high from running my air conditioning non stop. I cannot function in a hot apartment.
