jesse_the_k | Poll: HVAC and the Turning Seasons

We've had a warm fall so far -- no frost yet! MyGuy and I live on the edge, so we didn't turn on our heat until last night (39°F/4°C). Which led me to wonder about your relationship to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning.

Poll #26238 HVAC Poll

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 51

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What determines when you turn on the heat or cooling?

View Answers

tradition
5 (9.8%)

delay to save money
11 (21.6%)

delay to save energy
15 (29.4%)

somebody needs: warming/cooling/breathing
42 (82.4%)

landlord/super/outside my control
8 (15.7%)

perfect temps at my place, no HVAC needed
1 (2.0%)

see comments
4 (7.8%)

Hot stuff: My living space is heated by

View Answers

direct solar
1 (2.0%)

direct biofuel stove: wood/peat/dung/grasses
2 (3.9%)

direct fossil fuel stove: coal/oil/petrol/gas
27 (52.9%)

electricity (from hydro/fossil fuels/solar/biofuels/nuclear)
25 (49.0%)

see comments
6 (11.8%)

Cool it buddy: My living space is cooled by

View Answers

opening the window
34 (66.7%)

manual fan
3 (5.9%)

electric fan
30 (58.8%)

evaporative (aka swamp) cooler
1 (2.0%)

room size conditioner
18 (35.3%)

whole house air conditioner
15 (29.4%)

moving somewhere cooler
5 (9.8%)

see comments
5 (9.8%)

General Annoyances

View Answers

Tick
19 (54.3%)

Tock
16 (45.7%)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

sonia

My furnace burns natural gas. Is that so rare that it didn't make the poll? (ETA oh I skipped that one because it says "stove", which it isn't. Checked now.) As you probably saw, I'm considering adding a heat pump for the bedroom so I'd be heating/cooling with electricity at that point.

I didn't check "moving somewhere cooler" because I thought you meant a house move, but I do sit down in the basement when the main floor gets unbearable, and I work down there, which is a relief on hot days. Hm and that's heated with electric heaters. I'll see if I can amend my answers. (ETA amended)

Edited Date: 2021-10-16 09:14 pm (UTC)

From:

tarasacon

^^^
My apartment also has a natural gas furnace, but I’ll be buying an electric space heater to use in the front or back rooms when I’m in them, because it’ll be cheaper.

From:

jesse_the_k

Does the gas furnace offer heat to all the apartments? Or do you have a wee furnace in a closet?

Having burned myself on an exposed electric heater as a kid, I've always been leery of them. Then a pal got a standalone electric-powered oil-filled radiator, which puts out a steady warm heat.

From:

tarasacon

In this particular building, each of the four apartments has a furnace. Three of them are in the attic, the fourth is in a little storm cellar. The gas water heaters are in little closets in the kitchen.

From:

jesse_the_k

The melting candle story is terrifying!

My HVAC instructor from the local community college would have been mortified by my "furnace" omission. Back in 1978 heat pumps were a futuristic technology used in large office buildings, so I'm learning along with you.

Basements in the summer can provide dark, blissful relief.

From:

cosmolinguist

This poll has taught me that despite living here for almost ten months I don't know if the boiler (heating) is gas or electric! I guessed gas, I think they're usually gas, but both are possible. :)

From:

jesse_the_k

I'll admit my steady diet of Dickens and Sayers growing up left me thinking all of the UK heats with coal, plus you have to put a quarter in the fireplace to get the coal to burn.

From:

kaffy_r

I checked fossil fuel stove because I assumed that would include furnaces. My Best Beloved and I agree that one of the two best things about buying our tiny condo 17 years ago was the built in HVAC which saves us from lugging window air conditioners out every summer, and which switches to wonderfully even heat in the winter. (The other good thing is that we have our own washer and dryer, so we don't have to pay at a laundromat, but I digress.)

Both he and I were always very sensitive to heat - migraines and other ailments were our bugaboos when we were young, if we didn't have a very cool environment. That sensitivity has only increased as we've gotten older, so the ability to turn the AC way up in the summer, and the ability to turn evening temperatures down to 68 in the winter by turning down the furnace thermostat has been a life saver.

I do spend a bit of time feeling guilty about the AC; at least our AC rooftop unit doesn't use freon, which could have been the case.

From:

jesse_the_k

We've also gotten much more sensitive to temperature changes as we age.

The pollen and humidity outside our air-conditioned parlor are real barriers for me.

I hope that skinflint younger!me balances out the high usage now.

From:

duskpeterson

AC is determined by what temperature our medicines want; otherwise, I'd leave it off till we reached 90 degrees, because air conditioning dries out my eyes.

From:

adrian_turtle

I have a wonderful little gadget that solved that problem, back when I lived in an apartment I couldn't air condition. It was sold as a "4-bottle wine cooler," and it's about the size of a microwave oven. You plug it in and set the temperature for something between 45 and 66 degrees F. I won't have wine in the apartment, so we call it "the 66," based on the number on the front.
"Where are the chocolate chips?"
"They're in the 66."
Even after moving to a place where I could put an air-conditioner in my bedroom window, I didn't want to waste money on cooling when I wasn't home.

From:

adrian_turtle

This is a larger machine by a different manufacturer that seems to do the same thing. You can probably find one used, from somebody that got one as a wedding present.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/insignia-8-bottle-wine-cooler-stainless-steel/6418303.p?skuId=6418303

From:

yourlibrarian

Kind of had several different answers for each. I always try to hold off heating or cooling as much as possible, more to decrease energy use than cost. But at a certain point it's too cold or hot.

We have a gas furnace but we rent an apartment so we have no control over energy sources.

Depending on the temperature, we open the windows, open them and use a fan, use the AC, or use the AC + a fan.

Agreed about the warm fall. Last night was the first time I had to put on fleece, both while awake and while asleep. But still no heat from this week's forecast. Hopefully it will be December before I have to do that. I don't mind the AC but I hate putting on heat because it dries everything out. Also, there's this constant seesaw of getting too cold before it kicks back on, whereas at least in the summer I can flick a fan on and off to compensate.

From:

julian

We rent, and have oil. I generally don't want to start heating until slightly later in the season, but there was a near-freezing night awhile back, so we started earlier. (And then we had like 75-and-humid for the past *week*, whine.)

As for cooling, I don't like to use the window A/C until it's near 90 and/or extremely humid. I'll open windows at night/close in daytime, then resort to fan, and only then A/C. (Sometimes I'll hang out in the basement, but the current basement sucks for that.)

From:

davidgillon

My heating is set to 21C year round. Given borked joints my body deals poorly with cold temperatures, so I'd rather face the bills than the price.

My central heating is driven by a natural gas*-fired condensing boiler with a radiator in every room in the house. Couldn't bring myself to call that a stove. This is the overwhelmingly dominant UK system, though the government recently decided to deprecate the technology and declare electric heat pumps are the future.

* Apparently that may shift to 80% natural gas/20% blue** hydrogen
** Generated by fossil fuels, not renewables

From:

chanter1944

General annoyances: Tick, because yes, ticks are annoying. And evil. :P Couldn't resist.

From:

melannen

I have lived pretty much my whole life in a compact brick house surrounded by tall mature trees, in a climate that ranges from 100-10 deg F in an average year.

The apartment upstairs is heated by an oil furnace in the winter. It's got a programmable thermostat that keeps it from ever dropping below 60 degrees. We keep it fairly cool in winter for money/efficiency/actually liking to feel the seasons reasons; the heat basically goes on whenever Mom gets up in the morning and decides she's cold, and is usually on for good by mid- November, with the thermostat keeping it warmer in the day and cool at night. It also has a wood fireplace that's historically seen a lot of use (with scavenged wood), though that is out of commission since last year until we figure out what to do about the chimney.

Cooling upstairs is open windows and electric fans. We have one portable AC unit because I talked my mom in to getting one by pointing out that if someone was sick or something and we really needed one, it would be better to already have it, but most years we don't even get it out. There are usually 7-10 days a summer when it's hot enough to be really uncomfortable, but mostly between the trees and the thermal intertia of the brick it doesn't get above 85 or so indoors no matter how hot outside. On the really hot days we go somewhere air-conditioned in the afternoon; on nights when the house doesn't cool we sleep on the screenporch; but even with global-warming heatwaves those have been rare (basically it has to go three or four days with *nighttime* temps in the high 90s to get that bad.)

Downstairs is a full basement apartment. Just being a basement is its main climate control. We've been renting it out until recently, so it's been awhile since I've spent enough time there to know the details of the seasons. But it keeps cool by itself even better in the summer than the upstairs does; it basically self-air-conditions if we keep the windows closed. It gets really humid though, so we run electric dehumidifiers all summer. It has electric baseboard heat for the winters. The tenant basically never used it, but the tenant also went camping in December every year, so IDK. It also has a fireplace that is also temporarily out of commission, the tenant used that preferentially to the heaters. I haven't felt the need to have heat on downstairs yet this year though, even when upstairs is starting to be chilly at night? We'll see. We just put in new baseboard heaters to replace the rusty ones from the 70s; we were looking to see if we could get more efficient ones but I guess electric heat was basically at max efficiency already. (Our electric is about 35% nuclear, 35% gas, 15% renewable and the rest coal and oil.)

Edited Date: 2021-10-17 01:33 am (UTC)

From:

azurelunatic

We also have a heating thermostat that pays attention to time. It warms up in time for Belovedest to go to work, then chills down during the day, and warms up again in time for them to get home, and chills off at night again. It's preprogrammed rather than smart.

Our AC is not smart, but our electronic home assistant (Home Assistant, specifically) gives us a prompt that it's probably time to turn on the AC when the inside temperature exceeds a certain threshold and the outside temperature is also hot. It might also prompt us to open the windows if inside is too hot and outside is cool, but I don't recall if/whether we programmed that.

From:

melannen

Oh, yeah, they are programmable - on a timer - not smart. (some of our electric fans are also programmable/on a thermostat, so they know when it's time to blow cool air in from outside.)

I was also reminded by your post below that I have electric heating pads I use as bedwarmers! My feet get down to about 70 deg body temperature in winter, which is not enough to warm the blankets by themselves, but I just need enough of a kickstart from the heating pad to get the blood flowing, I don't need or want to heat the whole room! So heating pads in the bed.

From:

azurelunatic

I use small hot water bottles for that, from the electric hot water heater. One for each cold set of feet in the bed. (Kittenpants uses an occupant of the bed as her paw-warmer.)

From:

azurelunatic

Welcome back!

We use tradition as a guide for when to make the heating/cooling available (mostly notes from the year before -- I have a little pack of quarter-sheet notes on the holidays and seasons that rotates on the fridge to remind us what to get set up when, and what people want to do in honor of what holidays. It includes notes on when we should put the AC in the windows, and when we should call to schedule a furnace checkup. (We like to do those early so we're prepared for early heat waves in the summer, and so we beat the fall rush in the winter.)

When we actually turn those on depends on people noticing when we want climate control. I have warm slippers I wear year-round as needed indoors, because we have a cold basement and I'm on meds with cold feet as a side effect. (Plus I always have gotten cold extremities when concentrating, a fact that I used to startle my friends during Standardized Test Week, even though I didn't find them emotionally stressful.) So my clothing delays when we want to warm things up. We also have some electric blankets. Mine is parked by my computer, because that's where I tend to get chilly. I have analog blankets on the couch and in bed. I like to hide from cold in bed.

We have a natural gas furnace in the basement and have been relying on window AC for a while (one in the living room, one in each normally occupied bedroom) but will be getting ductless heat pumps/mini-splits in about a month, since our AC needs rose sharply over the past few summers. The ductwork Has Some Problems, and bleeds off a good portion of heat into the basement, which is mostly unused/unfinished. I have a small space heater for my craft corner of the basement when it gets too chilly down there, which it definitely does in the winter.

The basement stays much cooler than the upstairs in the summer, and we have retreated down there quite a bit.

We have a couple fans to extend the range of the ACs, and will probably shuffle those around to support the mini-splits unless those have much more powerful fans than our portable/window ACs have.

From:

agoodwinsmith

I use a natural gas furnace, which also uses electricity because it is a forced air system. I'm much less tolerant of cold anymore, and if I am cold, I turn on the heat. I keep it at 22.22 C (which is 72 F, which is how old my system is because it doesn't measure in Cs).

I have an AC for summer, but I manage it. I don't use it until the temp inside reaches 78 and then I keep it there until it comes down again. I may run it for two or three hours during the longest days. I live up a hill, so most evenings cool off.

When it was so brutally smokey this summer, I kept the windows closed, and ran the fan of the furnace, to force the air through the filter.

From:

agoodwinsmith

Oh yes, I forgot to mention: a long time ago we were very broke, and so we went one winter with low heat and lots of sweaters and socks. That was fine, but we got mildew in everything, and *nothing* gets that stuff out. I'd rather pay for heat.

From:

sasha_feather

I think the main thing that prevents me from putting on the AC is that it's noisy. I also dislike having the windows closed in the summer; if the AC is on for a few days it starts to feel stuffy in the house.

From:

melannen

It's amazing how much nicer it is in a house where the windows get opened (assuming your outdoor air is okay, of course.)

From:

luzula

My rented apartment is heated by district heating. The heat is apparently (I had to look this up) generated by 1) industrial waste heat, 2) burning refuse/trash, 3) burning biomass or fossil gas.

From:

susanreads

I'm all-electric on a "renewable" tariff. I have 3 different types (and ages) of heaters in various rooms, all with different control systems. I generally delay by putting more clothes on until I can't any more; this year I'm hoping to get some plumbing work done and the back door weather-proofed first.

From:

tarasacon

I would delay to save $$, but my fibromyalgia means being chilled can be very painful, and humidity is a trigger for my ptsd, so I use the AC and the furnace more than I did when I was younger and would mostly depend on opening and closing windows.

The apartment I lived in when I was ~19-21 was heated by pipes running inside the main interior wall, which were in turn heated by either warm water or oil moving through them. It was wonderful and I loved it! My mom’s house is heated via passive solar heating, plus a wood stove. One of the places we lived briefly before that was heated only by a wood stove (both those were in Oregon). So I’ve lived with a range of options at various times.

From:

tarasacon

Anyway, last year I sweet talked the landlord into pulling the window units for the AC over the winter, but this year I’m weatherizing around them. I did the one in the middle room this morning, and will tackle the back room another day.

From:

walgesang

Good to see you! <3

Our landlord controls the heat, which can sometimes either be overwhelmingly hot or too cold (though I am the one who is always bundled up while others are comfy in t-shirts). On the upside, we have endless hot showers because our heat is mostly from solar panels (thanks, landlord!). My dream is one day to be able to control both heat and a/c, but that feels like a luxury.

From:

talkswithwind

Our internal temperature is determined by the comfort zone of She Who Has Raynauds. Functionally this means between 72 and 78 degrees year round. Her fingers are room-temperature, so we need to keep the room above 'painful'.

From:

motorharp

I leave my thermostat at the same temperature all year, so when the heat kicks on, I know it's time to turn on the heat. Unless I'm just particularly cold that day. And I usually leave it at about 65F for $ savings.

For the same reason (in hotter temps), my AC ia a last resort. Like this past summer when the inside of my house got up to 95. Yikes.