At 8.50am on Friday 16 January the hill outside had gone quiet, the way it only does when there is snow on it. The heating had been on since 6.30am and the thermometer on the box room shelf still said 14.5°C. My fingers had gone the colour of a cold sausage, and I had a video call at nine. Matt had left for school an hour earlier. His parting line, delivered over toast, was "You're heating six rooms for a person who's in one."
He was right. On Wednesdays and Fridays I work from home, and until that week I'd been heating the house as if it were full: the usual morning blast, then a manual boost through the day, the thermostat at 19°C and me wandering round in a jumper complaining. It felt daft heating a whole house for one person sitting at a desk. So I stopped.
One warm room
The box room is the smallest room in the house, about 2.1 by 1.9 m, with a single radiator, and a room that size warms up quickly. On work-from-home days I now turn the thermostat down to 16°C and every radiator except the box room's goes to 1 or 2 on its valve. The box room one goes to 4. The programmer is set for Wednesdays and Fridays to run from 7.45am to 4pm, so I'm warm by about 10am and the rest of the house sits at a cool 15 or 16°C.
Because we run the boiler at 55°C, the radiators are warm rather than hot, and it takes the box room about two hours to climb from 14.5°C to 18°C. That's slower than I'd like, which is why the heating comes on at 7.45am, three-quarters of an hour before I sit down.
The rest of the kit
The box room can only do so much on its own, so I'm also wearing a thermal vest under a jumper, fleece-lined joggers, two pairs of socks and fingerless gloves, which turned out to be the only gloves that let me type. A hot-water bottle goes on my lap, filled from the £22 kettle. There is a 100 W heated throw over my knees that costs about 3p an hour to run, so roughly 20p a day. On video calls I look like a person in a modern office from the waist up, and from the waist down I'm in Matt's old tracksuit bottoms.
At lunchtime I walk down the hill to the library and back, 25 minutes, which warms my feet more than a whole afternoon of radiator. I fill a flask at 12.30 and finish it by three. Pickle has moved her afternoons from the radiator shelf in the front room to my lap, which makes her a 4 kg hot-water bottle with opinions. She likes to go to sleep on the keyboard.
What the gas meter said
I read the in-home display at the start and end of every work-from-home day. In December and the first half of January my Wednesdays and Fridays averaged about 53 kWh of gas. The six days I've done the new way, from Wednesday 21 January to today, average about 41. Those weeks were colder than the weeks before, if anything, so I don't think the weather flatters the result.
That's 12 kWh less a day. At roughly 6p to 7p a kWh for gas, it's around 80p, so £1.60 a week and about £7 a month. The heated throw eats a quarter of that. It won't pay for the kitchen, and it's not a saving worth putting in a headline, but it's money I'm not burning to heat the back bedroom, which nobody was using and which is the coldest room in the house.
The honest downside is that the rest of the house is cold when I come down at 4pm. The front room reads 15°C when I walk in, and Matt gets home to a house that needs a few minutes to warm up. He is fine with it. He says it's a good excuse to put the kettle on.
