When Do you Turn on the Heat?

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You might want to sit down for this, but in my area a "full" cord goes for anything between $180.00 - $220.00. I myself either harvest it, find it on Craig list, Line clearing/road work, free from arborists or I purchase lumber logs, mill what I want and burn the rest. I process the wood myself.

Kaj
 
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Be careful about your plumbing. Indiana without any heat in the house = frozen & burst pipes.

Are you renting or do you own? Just so you know, if you are renting, you may be able to be evicted if the landlord discovers that you are not heating the place. It was actually in the lease where I lived. A minimum temperature was specified for the purpose of protecting the plumbing (not that I paid attention to the specific temp given...)

Just a tip, too: Don't broadcast locally that you will be living without heat. Depending on your local ordinances, if you have any "enemies" they may be able to cause serious problems for you. Here it violates the city ordinances to heat the house below a certain temp (really high, actually - something like 68 degrees during the day. Again something a lot of people easily ignore. Seems like it's 65 at night. I may be off on the specific temps.) Having ANY habitable room that is not heated to those temps in the winter violates our city codes, too. Again, something to mostly ignore but to be aware of in case there are people who might cause problems. I think probably the biggest time these things come up as an issue are when CPS is involved or you have a family member causing trouble (ex spouse? inlaws?)

I fully understand the reasons you need to do this. Just sharing some problems that could arise, so you can protect yourself against them.

We're renting to own, but shoot, the pipes break even when the house is fully heated! This is a big OLD drafty house, but when the windows and doors are sealed tight, we do fine. At it's coldest, the house was 55 last January, without the heat on, but I guarantee that the windows were sealed tight. Usually it's around 62 or so, and that's not uncomfortable for us. Shoot, we're from Chicago, lol!

We do have a fireplace, but can't use it, and don't dare use it because the chimney is falling apart. The chimney hasn't been used in probably 20 years? The last couple that lived here had a wood stove hooked up so that it was venting out the fireplace, but my mother didn't understand how to use it, and being a city girl, she wanted the furnace heat, so she actually gave the stove away! I'm really mad now that she did that. I don't know how well that stove would heat this house though, it was a small stove.

Landlord can't say crap, he never even put heat to the second floor. My kids can't be in their rooms in the summer cause it's too hot, or in their rooms in the winter or they freeze. It gets cold up there. We don't plan to stay here much longer. We don't go around telling anyone that we don't have heat. I would really like to invest in an electric fireplace. I think that would really help.

I have an appointment to see a doctor to try to get on SS and Medicaid, and provided I can get on SS, the first check they send me is going to buy oil for the tank. One check alone will put enough oil in the tank for about 2 month, but it's needed, and we STILL won't put it on until we absolutely need to. At this time, it's not even cold enough to be too worried. We're already working on "winterizing" the house, but at the same time I'm looking for jobs and housing out of state, preferably in Kentucky or Tennessee. If we can hightail it out of here, you bet your booty we'll be GONE!
 
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It would cost around $5000 to replace our single pane windows. That's 1/4th of my homes value. An just not going to happen on my income. It would take me over 15 years to recoup that investment anyway. So no, thats not how low income folks do it. I'll just pay my $800 a year propane bill.
 
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It would cost around $5000 to replace our single pane windows. That's 1/4th of my homes value. An just not going to happen on my income. It would take me over 15 years to recoup that investment anyway. So no, thats not how low income folks do it. I'll just pay my $800 a year propane bill.

I hear you on that. We replaced 8 windows in this house at a cost of $3000, and there are probably about 30 more windows that need to be replaced. At that rate we'd be spending probably about half what this house costs, not to mention that one of the house's support beams is held up on bricks, not a concrete pillar. Almost all the basement windows are broken. We covered them with plastic, but the neighbor's cats broke down most of it so that they could sneak in and have their kittens, so it all needs to be replaced again. Before we moved in, kids in town used the sun porch windows as targets for shooting their BB guns, and then add in the terrible winds we get out here, and we've lost two more windows on the sun porch. I already completely sealed one window up on the sun porch, and there isn't so much as a draft coming through it, but when the winds really start to pick up, and they will, I'll probably have to redo the whole thing AND have to nail the tape down. The front door on the sun porch doesn't close right, and it opens in the wind, so I nailed it shut last winter and that really helped, but then my ding dong kids opened it this summer. I gave them a good chewing out, but I gotta get in there and nail it shut again. We tried at first to block the door with really heavy items, but even with about 300 lbs in front of the door, it STILL blew open! So nailing it shut was really our only option.

I bought that plastic last year at Wal-Mart, they stuff that you can put up and then blow dry to shrink wrap, and we sealed every window in the living room with it, and it helped sooooo much. We did all the dining room windows too.
 
Oops, double post, sorry! Computer is acting up!
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We just wait until somebody gives in and fires up the outdoor wood furnace. Wood has been our only heat source for 25 years, with the last 6 years using the outdoor furnace.... so much better than having a wood stove in the house!

The best part is having our hot water tied in with the furnace.
big_smile.png
Never-ending hot water!
 

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