On Jan 15, 10:17 pm, "Dr. Hardcrab"
wrote:
You know what gets meare the people that have weekend homes around here and
the can't understand why
they go through so much oil during the winter.

"I keep the thermostat all the way down at 60 degrees!"

They can't understand that when it's in the lower 20s at night, it's going
to burn some oil to keep it at 60.

I dunno, it's pretty routinely around that temp where I live at night,
and I keep the thermostat on 64 after 11PM and the heat rarely comes
on overnight. (I'm kind of a night owl on weekends, so I know.)
Thing is, if you've got a house that's good at holding heat, it's
going to take it a while to really drop down into the lower 60's
assuming it's kept close to 70 during the day. (We keep ours at 70.)
In fact, my heat usually only comes on twice a day unless it's really
down at around zero degrees outside - then it starts to have a hard
time keeping up.

We do have plaster walls that are good at holding heat, and we've done
our best to weatherstrip the hell out of this place and replace any
leaking doors and windows. This house was not this efficient when we
bought it, that's for sure. But I'm sure plenty of houses are more
efficient than ours, even now.

Those old stone castles are actually also really good at holding in
heat. The problem is there's no good way to heat an entire castle, so
of course they're cold today if you go and stay in one now in a room
that was never used during winter when the castle was built. That's
not what they used to do back in the day; the family would live in a
couple of interior rooms during winter and they'd heat that with a
couple of massive fireplaces that were constantly running. I
guarantee you those castles were plenty warm - stone walls radiate
warmth and seal out any cold air pretty darn effectively.