{"id":1580,"date":"2022-12-16T11:20:25","date_gmt":"2022-12-16T18:20:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/?p=1580"},"modified":"2022-12-16T13:20:31","modified_gmt":"2022-12-16T20:20:31","slug":"now-that-i-pay-for-my-own-heat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/2022\/12\/now-that-i-pay-for-my-own-heat","title":{"rendered":"now that I pay for my own heat"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/69100362303__53FD9C08-817A-40C7-B3A6-060F0E90CA98.jpg\" alt=\"a pellet stove with a fire in it in front of two windows with sheer curtains\" width=\"600\" height=\"800\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1581\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/69100362303__53FD9C08-817A-40C7-B3A6-060F0E90CA98.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/69100362303__53FD9C08-817A-40C7-B3A6-060F0E90CA98-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/69100362303__53FD9C08-817A-40C7-B3A6-060F0E90CA98-525x700.jpg 525w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>There are a few major things that have changed with my move two blocks up the road. Being a homeowner comes with all sorts of new stuff in it and the three things that are the biggest deal for me are.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Having my bedroom and office on a different floor from my kitchen and my living room. For the first month or two I was here, I felt like I was forever going up and down stairs. My last place was on the second floor but most days I&#8217;d go down to &#8220;ground level&#8221; maybe once or twice.\n<li>Having a split sink. This feels so minor but my last kitchen had one big sink, this one has a split sink. No big  deal but just the basic &#8220;You move the faucet here and the water goes there&#8221; muscle memory has been tough to retrain.\n<li>Paying for my own heat. People who know me well know that I grew up in a miserly-feeling household and I have some maladaptive miser issues. In my old apartment, heat was included in the rent. I still kept the heat lowish but I did keep it on. In this place, with the price of heating oil like it is, I&#8217;ve been trying to walk the line between reasonable and prudent energy conservation and being ridiculously cold at all times.<\/ol>\n<p>The heat thing is such an interesting puzzle, to me, because there are so many moving parts. Here are some of those parts, the things I do differently now that I am paying for my own heat.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I blow dry my hair now. Sitting around in a slightly-cold house with damp hair is a non-starter. This also means I got a blow dryer. And I got a trim, the first haircut I&#8217;ve gotten since 2018, because my ends were getting all frizzly. I kept saying I&#8217;d cut it back to short when we sold my mom&#8217;s house and&#8230; that&#8217;s been taking a while.\n<li>I have space heaters now, a bunch of them. If I know I&#8217;m going to be in my office for a chunk of time, I&#8217;ll just fire up the space heater with the door closed, no sense in heating the entire house.\n<li>I have zones now (upstairs and downstairs) and I get to try to figure out how to optimize zone heating. Like why heat the upstairs more than the minimum if I&#8217;m not up there? But then I turn the upstairs heat up before I go to bed, but not TOO far up because there are enormous radiators. By the time they&#8217;re hot, they&#8217;re staying hot. Sleeping in a hot room in the winter feels wrong. I regularly turn the heat up to 65 upstairs and by the time the boiler cuts off, it&#8217;s over 70. Weird!\n<li>Along the same lines I have  a heated mattress pad on my bed, an electric blanket for the guest room, and a smaller throw (I call it the electric woobie) for when I&#8217;m reading downstairs in the morning. Colder rooms, warmer feet.\n<li>I closed my front door completely off. The entryway is already pretty chilly since it&#8217;s in the far reaches of the downstairs relative to the pellet stove. So there&#8217;s a little note written on a card catalog card that says use the side door. This house could really use a mud room but there&#8217;s no obvious place for one.\n<li>I got a pellet stove. This is a huge change. I&#8217;ve never had one before. I&#8217;ve been reading owner&#8217;s manuals, learning the cleaning schedule, ordering pellets by the ton. This means the kitchen is a decent temperature which is good because it&#8217;s COLD otherwise since it has two outside walls, a door to the outside, no real passive solar gain, and a fan which is basically a hole in the wall that is poorly insulated on the outside. Since there&#8217;s also running water in there, this is a huge plus. Also this particular pellet stove has a wood stove look and it&#8217;s making me remember back when I lived in Topsham and heated primarily with wood. So messy! So many heavy logs. A 40 pound bag of pellets is no joke, but even though the thing needs cleaning every other day, cleaning it doesn&#8217;t make ME dirty.\n<li>I have one upstairs room in this house with no heat in it at all (??). I haven&#8217;t been in it in a while. Closed the door, haven&#8217;t gone back.\n<li>I got <a href=\"https:\/\/windowdressers.org\/\">window inserts<\/a> for ten (out of 30-someodd) windows in the place. I think they&#8217;ve been useful but some of the window frames are kind of leaky so I&#8217;ve also been jamming rope caulk in all over the place.\n<li>At my old place, my usual house outfit was leggings and shorts and a sweater. In this house, I&#8217;m usually wearing at least one extra layer most days and slippers, always slippers.\n<li>My set point just seems lower nowadays. I feel warm in a room that&#8217;s in the low 60s. I fall asleep dreaming of curtains and rugs and fans and doorway schemes.\n<\/ul>\n<p>I know people have said they&#8217;d love to come visit. And I&#8217;d love to have you. But really, for your own comfort, wait until spring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<a href=\"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/2022\/12\/now-that-i-pay-for-my-own-heat\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permalink to now that I pay for my own heat\"><p>There are a few major things that have changed with my move two blocks up the road. Being a homeowner comes with all sorts of new stuff in it and the three things that are the biggest deal for me are. Having my bedroom and office on a different floor from my kitchen and my [&hellip;]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[465,660,83,661,662,663,140],"class_list":["post-1580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized","tag-cold","tag-hellohouse","tag-jessamyn","tag-stove","tag-warm","tag-warms","tag-winter","h-entry","hentry"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1580"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1586,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1580\/revisions\/1586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jessamyn.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}