I’m so glad that winter is almost over! Yesterday it reached 18 Celsius (64 F) in the afternoon … but in a few days we’ll be back to the usual cold March weather. Hopefully this March won’t be as bad as last year! I remember a few snow storms and one of the worst of the year happened in March of last year.
Other than going outside in the cold I dislike the cold winter months because our main bedroom, upstairs, is the coldest room in the house. I wrote a post about it recently on my main blog – talking about how I hate getting ready for bed in the room because it’s so chilly that I end up covered in goosebumps! Some of my readers on the other blog suggested a variety of things but the main suggestion was to use a heated blanket. While that’s a great suggestion for once we get into bed, it does nothing to help with the too cool room.
When we first moved into our house in June of 2001 we noticed that the main bedroom – at the end of a long hallway far away from the stairs, didn’t have any cold air return. So we had some duct work done and had a cold air return added to the room. I’m sure that helped, but we still had drafts in the room once winter came.
A couple of years after we moved in we decided to tear down two of the bedroom walls … well the plaster anyway, to find the source of the drafts. We plugged up a few cracks that we found in the triple brick in the top of the wall near the ceiling and some near the base of the wall and then used drywall to close up the wall again. That fix made the room quite a bit warmer than it had been, but it’s still cooler than the rest of the house.
Since the room is cool in the winter we’ve always used some kind of electric heater to warm the room for an hour or so once we got to bed. We turn it on for a while prior to going to bed and since it has a timer on it we set it to run for about an hour after we’ve gone to bed. That helps quite a bit, but unfortunately our heater stopped working so we now need a new one. Believe me … that heated blanket is becoming more and more appealing!
We obviously still have some air leaks in the room because the room is too warm in the summer as well. Maybe we’ll have to tear down all the walls to find any other cracks that we missed.
Do any of you have the same problem? Is your bedroom a lot cooler than the rest of your house?
Funny you should ask the question. Our bedroiom was indeed the most cold, but we did some renovations two years ago so that we now have a heating vent. That leaves the main bathroom as the coldest room – the only one without its own heating vent. Maybe we’ll add heated floors some day…
David – you didn’t have a heating vent in your bedroom? Wow!
We did, but it’s split and shared with the middle upstairs bedroom. We did add an air flow booster to the vent that supplies the master bedroom. It’s like a motorized fan that hooks up to the furnace so when the furnace goes on the fan in the top of the vent turns on and pushes more hot air into the bedroom. That helps a lot too!
Oh and yes – heated floors would probably help too … do they do that on upstairs floors?
It’s an 1887 home. We’ve upgraded some parts; others still to come (when the economy improves).
Apparently they can do heated floors anywhere. If we do that, it will take some heating away from oil and move to electricity. My “deal” would be that if we get heated floors in the bathroom and perhaps elsewhere, I want a windmill to power it.