I stumbled across a post on Facebook (sorry!) a couple of days back, in the Diggers and Dreamers group in which a van-dweller was rather smugly commenting on how cheap it was to heat his van over winter in the context of the crazy energy prices resulting in millions of people in Britain struggling to heat their homes as much as they want.
Annoying I can't find the post, I'm thinking the author maybe deleted it as it was a little smug in tone, but the gist was that it was going to cost them well under £500 to get through the winter because they were mainly using a wood burning stove to heat a small, well insulated space, and their heating bills were incredibly minimal even with temperatures dropping below zero.
This prompted me to do a little digging into the extent of the problems people are finding with heating their typically much larger homes (larger in comparison to a van) and it's bad!
According to a recent [YouGov survey] only one in six Britons have the heating on as much as they like...
And about half are really struggling with either the heating not being on at all (!) or it not being on for as long or as hot as they'd like.
I mean I fully get why this is - energy prices have at least double d this winter compared to last, the prices of pretty much everything else have gone up and wages for many have stagnated so it's basic economics.
And of course space heating is incredibly inefficient in even relatively small homes, even those that are well insulated.
I mean just think of the sheer amount of space compared to people - looking around the room I'm in at the moment I only take up somewhere between 1-2% - you could cram 50 people in here easily, and that's just floor space, the ceiling's quite high, and so that's 98-99% of the space being heated that I'm not in at any one time.
Then add in the rest of the house - I mean how much space does one body take up in relation to a while house - 0.3%? - obviously it depends on the size of the house, and then compare that to a van - O.K. there's still a lot of dead space being heated but the ratio is going to be 3-5 times less probably.
And that's about the relative cost of heating a van compared to heating a house!
However I'm not sure that being smug about it is helpful, personally I'm more empathetic towards us poor old house dwellers, but I am fully onboard with the view that having MORE excess space than you need, for example extra bedrooms, is grossly inefficient.
And I'm going to big up my heated body warmer hear as an uber-strategy for keeping warm in a sub-optimally heated home.
in short - heat the person, not the space, it's so much more efficient and honestly it's also pretty damned toasty and comfortable too!