For months now I’ve been on covert operations, especially when it’s dark. Once the lights go out, I slip through the house, unseen by my husband, turning down the controls on the radiators in the living room, TV room, guest room, and hallway. I don’t touch the one in my husband’s office, for tactical reasons.
Every once in a while, you pass a radiator, notice it’s configured with the snowflake symbol, and turn it back up. As soon as possible, I will download it.
When he’s away, I also manipulate the thermostat, which eventually turns back up, triumphantly assuming he’s won this latest skirmish, not realizing that all my sneaking around the house turning the radiator dials makes the thermostat largely irrelevant, except in your office. That’s why I don’t play that one.
Sarah Frieze (yes, really) sneaks around the house, unseen by her husband, Anthony, turning down the dials on the radiators in every room except her own, for tactical reasons.
Intelligent? Not always. I once messed up the dial in the guest room and got it stuck on the highest position, which broke the mechanism. It cost me an £80 plumber visit. Which I managed to keep a secret from my husband.
It’s mid-November and British households are already locked in a bitter battle over heating. A new survey found that one in four regularly argue with their partner about the temperature, while 18 per cent get frustrated with family members who tinker with it. If they find out, of course.
My husband and I are practical and detail-oriented people. We agree on the level of lighting we need as the night progresses, on the components of our weekly shopping list, and on the correct day in December to put up our Christmas decorations. But we fought over the heating.
Survey Reveals One in Four Couples Regularly Argue About Temperature at Home, While 18 Percent Get Frustrated with Family Members Fidgeting with It (Posed by Models)
My daughter and I call it The Cold War, and in our house they play out along strict, if unconventional, gender lines.
Research published in 2019 showed that men and women generally want different things when it comes to indoor room temperature. In general, Ohio State University professor Nicole Sintov found that women tend to be warmer compared to the often colder preferences of men.
It’s a difference that has also long been the subject of charging wars.
In 2015, an article titled “Office Overcooling Reveals Gender Inequality in Thermal Comfort” showed that thermostats were set in office buildings according to a formula from the 1960s based on the heat needs of a male. 40 years old who weighed 11 pounds.
Apparently, men function better in colder temperatures, while women perform at higher levels on mental tasks when it’s warmer, meaning the corporate thermostat traditionally favored the perfect male work environment at the expense of women. .
“We are now seeing this in family conflicts over temperature, where women may be losing the thermostat battle,” says Professor Sintov. “This hints at a gender bias in the status quo in heating environments leading to a domestic thermal environment that does not meet women’s preferences.”
Well, some women. Perhaps Professor Sintov would like to come study us, because in my house the exact opposite is true. I am much more resistant to the cold than my husband Anthony. And while our 21-year-old son lounges around barefoot and in a T-shirt, shivering like a whippet and complaining about the cold, my 23-year-old daughter, a climate change warrior and charity shop devotee, is dressed in second-hand tweeds and sweaters from natural fibers, and wrapped in a duvet if all else fails. Given even the slightest chance, she too will turn down the dial.
My husband, on the other hand, is a tropical flower. While I like my thermostat at a quick and economical 17°C, he turns it up to 24°C (according to this week’s survey, the “ideal” temperature for his home is 19.5°C).
I dread the day when I sign us up for one of the app-controlled heating systems and can control the thermostat from afar, which is what happens to my shivering friend Deborah. ‘I upload it because I’m the one at home freezing and he monitors it through the app from work and downloads it. It’s a yo-yo battle!’
To be fair, my husband has two credible defences: he was born in Australia and he pays the heating bills. It’s not that I don’t pay anything. We split our expenses pretty evenly, but the things I pay for (groceries, TV subscriptions, and water bills) don’t cause similar dramas.
I’m a loving enough wife not to want open conflict, so I counterattack with guerrilla warfare. We live in a narrow semi-detached house. My husband insists that near the bottom of the house you have the radiators on in all the rooms because they heat up the upper floors. One of the main new features is the large radiator in our lobby, which throws heat onto the street every time the front door is opened.
“Hot air comes up the stairs,” Anthony says firmly.
A bone of contention between Susannah and Anthony is the hallway radiator, which spews heat onto the street every time the front door is opened.
“Thermal convection replaces the colder air from the street with the warm air in our living room,” I respond.
Ah, these winter nights of warm banter and debate.
Hostilities were broken up by buying him a thick crimson and white wool blanket to “wear” inside rather than relying on the heat levels of the greenhouse. At first he wasn’t impressed, but when I told him how majestic it was and how good it suited him, he relented.
She was happy to hear that we could try to claim household expenses because we were working from home. ‘My employer would pay us to be warm enough in the office,’ he boasted, ‘so they can pay us to be warm enough at home!’
But I wasn’t eligible because I’m self-employed, and his relief (granted by the Income Tax, Income and Pensions Act 2003) was capped at £244 a year with a ton of paperwork that even he didn’t think was worth the money. worth the effort.
Susannah’s feet are cold, but her husband objects to her friendly suggestion of practicing thermal convection under the covers.
It took a family meeting and a poker-based negotiation (‘I’ll look at your 17 degrees and raise it to 19 degrees’) for us to reach a compromise, helped by the fact that we now have low-cost products. Underfloor heating in the kitchen with a separate thermostat set to 18.2°C by our builders that none of us know how to change yet.
So now I work in a constant state of bliss around the kitchen table in our basement, and His Lordship reigns over his thermostat set to 22°C in solitary splendor downstairs.
Our only place of true peace is the bedroom, which neither of us likes to heat, preferring a cold nose and a thick duvet.
But then there are the Coldfoot Wars. For a warm-blooded person, I have the cold feet of a turtle. For some reason, my husband objects to my friendly suggestion that we practice thermal convection under the covers. “No, I don’t want your cold feet getting into my warm calves,” he complains.
For now, I will continue with low-level resistance and with gas prices rising, I hope to build on my advantage by Christmas.
ANTONIO WRITE:
There were times in the early days of the thermostat wars when I allowed my wife’s arguments to persuade me that turning down the heat was good for us and our wallets.
The problem was that we both looked like Soviet-era gulag prisoners, wrapped in cloaks and covered in hoods and scarves. Not only did I find it difficult to bend my arm enough to write, but opening the door to the countless deliveries we received for a house full of people working from home became embarrassing.
In the early days of the thermostat wars with Susannah, Anthony says they looked like Soviet-era gulag prisoners, wrapped in layer after layer, covered in hoods and scarves.
The delivery driver, outside, lightly clad in designer pants and fleece, in awe of the recipient of the Siberian package, inside, extending blue-tipped hands encased in fingerless gloves.
—Are you okay, friend? they would ask. —Is the boiler broken?
You are right in saying that things improved when you bought me my ermine-trimmed dressing gown. It envelops my frozen loins and makes me feel like an eccentric aristocrat in his unheatable Scottish castle. And it can easily be pushed aside when the doorbell rings for the hundredth time in a day.
What Susannah hasn’t gotten into (as she rebels against the modern tendency to “blame” everything on menopause) is that her natural body temperature is quite a bit higher than it was. Hot flashes mean we are not operating on a level playing field.
Not that I was ever dumb enough to bring this into the thermostat wars. If there’s one thing I know about menopause, it’s that you choose your battles carefully.