(I also have a Norwegian version of this post published externally)
Norwegians are used to cheap and stable electricity prices (I've written a bit about it in my previous Norwegian post). Electricity is our main source of heating in the winter time. Access to cheap electricity 24/7 seems to be almost a holy Norwegian right for some. There has been a lot of fuzz recently due to high electricity prices, so the government has decided to step in and subsidize electricity. At one hand it's sort of fair - many people haven't had enough time to prepare for high electricity prices, it's hard to live a Norwegian life without access to cheap electricity, the government is raking in money both due to direct ownership in many of the power plants and due to taxation of power plants - so the government can for sure afford to pay some of the money back to the people. At the other hand, I think it's madness to subsidize energy consumption - and I think the most important thing is this: the reason why the prices are high is that there is an unbalance between the supply and the demand. Subsidies will help increasing the demand, causing even higher market prices. I believe that if all of us would do a best effort on reducing the wattage used when the prices are too high, not only would the personal energy bill go down, but the market price would also go down. A massive saving campaign would probably do more good than subsidies!
I can for sure afford my electricity bill - but still, for me it has become sort of a sport to keep my consumption as low as possible.
The two things the average Norwegian spends most electricity on in the winter time is keeping the house warm, and the production of hot tap water. In this article I will give hints on how to reduce the heating costs.
I read about a guy that couldn't afford the electricity bill, he took his charcoal grill into the kitchen - and died from the carbon monoxide. I've also read about people that believe it's a good idea to save electricity by heating the house with candles! The candles are most likely less dangerous than the grill, but ... it's probably not a good idea (and probably not even possible to save significantly with money on it). Carbon monoxide alarms may be a good idea for people who are primarily heating their houses through combustion - and it's absolutely a good idea when the combustion exhaust is going straight out into the indoor air.
In this article I'm arguing for reducing the indoor temperature. Some will surely claim that it's also unhealthy, that it's easier to catch the cold if having it cold in the appartment. As far as I know, there exists no credible science confirming or rejecting such a correlation. Personally I do believe low indoor temperatures aren't unhealthy, but it's probably not a good idea to save to the extent where one is freezing frequently or for longer periods.
I do believe it's healthy to sleep in a cold sleeping room with an open window. I've always thought it's abnormal to heat up bedrooms (in our house there was no heating in the bedrooms when we bought the house). However, I recently read a Norwegian article where some students are complaining that the high electricity prices are forcing them to sleep without the heat on and that it's probably unhealthy! I'm a bit shocked. With a good mattress and a good douvet it shouldn't be necessary to have a warm bedroom! When we find it too cold in our bedroom, we simply close the window.
For me the concept of "nightcap" has been something used in cartoons (like Donald Duck) to make it clear that a person is sleeping, trying to sleep, or was woken up in the middle of the night - but nightcaps was relatively normal in earlier times. The primary purpose is to not freeze during the night. It does make sense, if one has a good douvet and mattress, most of the heat is lost through the head. If the bedroom temperature is so low that one is concerned it may be unhealthy - then wear a woolen hat! Sometimes I do sleep in temperatures below the freezing point (like in a tent, a cabin, on the boat, etc), then I'm always wearing my woolen hat.
I believe the standard indoor temperature in Norway has increased with perhaps 5C during the last decades. Do we really need to have it that warm in our homes?
In my wardrobe I have quite some sweaters that I rarely use - but why not to use them? Woolen clothes are good! During the last weeks I've frequently found myself sitting indoors with my woolen hat and a sweater. My boat is badly insulated, when I'm sitting in the boat in the winter time I frequently also wear my woolen long johns. I seriously believe some of the people that are wielding pitch forks and yelling for price controls on electricity should rather put on their long johns, turn down their heat and stop whining. There is a Norwegian saying that "there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes" - maybe it can be rewritten into "it's not too cold in the living room, you're just not wearing enough clothes"?
I also remember slippers and thick woolen socks was frequently used when I was a child, but quite infrequently used in Norway nowadays. Same goes to rugs and carpets.
When sitting still for too long in a cold room, at one point one may end up freezing despite being well dressed. At that point I would recommend getting up from the couch! It's not healthy to sit still for that long. Some activity will cause both better health and an increase in internal heat production, and often there isn't much that is needed - some house work can do the trick, or go out for a walk. And if you have some important deadline to meet, then may I suggest a cup of hot coffee or tea. Something hot to drink may help.
When having a big house, it's not needed to keep the whole house warm (but it is important to keep all water installations above the freezing point).
Keep all doors closed when it's cold. I have a policy of keeping the doors closed even between rooms that have or should have the same temperature.
I've had a policy that there is only two rooms that is heated 24/7 - it's the kitchen and the bathroom. That's the two rooms that we need in the mornings, and it's nice to have comfortable temperature there when getting up in the mornings. I've changed this policy slightly now, the heating in the kitchen is now off most of the night, and turned on before we get up from bed.
It's possible to take the concept of not heating more than necessarily even further. In Japan, Iran and Spain they have the concepts of kotatsu, korsi and brasero, heating up the space under the table to keep the feet warm. I've tried improvising something like that with woolen blankets when working from the boat on a cold winter day (with the diesel heater being out of order and being connected to expensive electricity), it did work out rather well.
If using a fan oven, it's possible to put it so that it blows hot air towards the freezing person.
In the bathroom I have a timer giving "reverse night saving", some days the electricty price is more than twice as high in the day time as in the night, so I'm having full effect in the floor heating during the night and turn down the termostat a lot during the daytime. The concrete floor in the bathroom can keep quite a lot of heat, I also have some rugs on the floor trying to delay the heat transfer even more.
I've installed Home Assistant and purchased some equipment, including plugs that can both turn on/off the electricity and measure the power consumption. Admittedly, I've probably spent more money and time on this equipment than what I will be able to save on it - but it's fun anyway. I have some temperature sensors, I'm getting in a price feed for the electricity prices with both the current electricity price and the upcoming prices (it can be configured to include all taxes and extra costs, but I didn't bother with it yet). There is a boolean output low price that yields true on the hours of the day where the electricity price is lower than average - such information may eventually be used for my bathroom floor, it's also useful for those having an electric car that should be charged, etc. I've made some algorithms for heating in the kitchen and the office, the termostat will be a bit adjusted dependent on weather the electricity price is expected to go up or down for the next hour (and how much), when it's going up it's smart to take out some extra heat before the price increases, when it's about to go down it's smarter to wait with the heat. The termostat is also adjusted depending on the absolute price of the electricity (when the electricity price is higher than normal we can probably wear a sweater, when it's low we can afford the luxury of t-shirt temperatures)
When a room is warm, the heat will dissapear through the floor, walls, ceiling and ventilation. The hotter it is, the faster the heat will disappear - hence it's profitable to adjust the temperature down. I've seen people claiming that it's counter-productive to save energy by adjusting down the temperature while sleeping, because then one will spend even more energy in the morning when heating up. Given constant electricity prices, that's just not true - but it may be true if the electricity cost is higher in the morning than during the night. Also, in some price models, the energy cost may increase dependent on the power consumption (making it more expensive to spend 4 kW for one hour than 1 kW for four hours).
Heat tends to travel upwards, there is probably not much of the heat going through the floor - a lot more is lost through the ceiling. But wait ... this is quite wrong, the heat is not "disappearing", it's just getting transported. Whatever heat is transported through the ceiling will be found again in the floor above. If that's where the crows live (we have the Norwegian expression "å fyre for kråka", making it hot for the crow, meaning to waste heat), then alas ... the heat is "lost". If having a big house and one can choose what room to spend most of the time, then choose the basement. If one is living in an apartment building with neighbours below and above, and if particularly the neighbour below like to have it warm and cozy, then it may be possible to be a freerider and spend nothing on heating.
Windows tend to leak heat - even with modern insulating glass, quite a lot more heat will dissapate through a thin window than through thick walls filled with modern insulation materials. The heat loss may be reduced a bit by using curtains.
Showering and food making contributes not only with heat but also with quite some humidity. If the humidity is not vented out, it can cause mould and other problems - but there is also some extra energy in the humid air. I'm sometimes using dehumidifying machines, both for drying my laundry on the line and to dry up the bathroom humidity. Such machines do need electricity, but all the energy they spend is converted to heat - and they even produce some extra heat. For every litre of water they collect, 0.6 kWh of heat is delivered to the air. If such a machine takes 400W and condenses half a litre per hour, then it will deliver 700W of heat.
Open the window - and the heat in the room will be thrown out the window. But ventilation may be important for the health and well-being of both the residents of the house and for the house itself. One mostly needs ventilation when sleeping, cooking, after toilet visits and after a shower. For the last of those, it's possible to use the dehumidifier instead of ventilating out the heat. I do like to have the window open in the bedroom - but if one likes to have some heat in the bedroom, sleeping with the bedroom door open may be an alternative. For the kitchen and the toilet, I would promote the concept of "surgery ventilation". The ventilation should be as powerful as possible, it should be where it's needed and when it's needed. It's much better to have a really powerful kitchen fan turned on exactly when it's needed than to have ventilation that works 24/7.
In Norway it's common to have shared toilet and bathroom, and those rooms tend to be fairly big. I'm a bit of a fan of small toilets with good ventilation fans. When polluting the air in a small room, only a small amount of air gets polluted, and it can be ventilated out relatively fast and without losing a lot of heat. When polluting the air in a big room, a lot of air (and hence also heat) needs to be ventilated out and it may take long time. Talking about "surgery ventilation", the very best place to have the ventilation fan in a toilet is inside the toilet itself. Toilets with under-pressure is the best - for those of us being a bit big in the butt, the ring will be almost sealed when sitting on it, the air in the toilet room won't be contaminated, the bad smells are ventilated out very efficiently and with a minimum of heat loss. I've only seen this concept in some combustion toilets and bio toilets though, but I'm pretty sure it should be possible to design a WC with built-in ventilation as well. Oh whatever, I'm digressing ...
When it's needed to ventilate a relatively big room, the best way to do so may be through "shock ventilation". Instead of having some small ventilation open 24/7, one should open all windows and doors and maximize the throughput for a minute or two. It's the most efficient way to get as much as possible of the air replaced with fresh air, and it preserves most of the heat stored in the walls, floor, ceiling and furniture.
