Joel Achenbach got his winter heating bill and turned his thermostat down. Part of his amusing take:
The average American burns roughly 47 jillion “British thermal units” of energy daily, plus an uncounted number of French and German thermal units. The general standard, in the past, was that you would turn down the thermostat only if there was evidence that your house was melting the under-lying planetary crust. People took pride in having a house so hot that, in the depths of winter, everyone sat around in undergarments, fanning themselves and holding iced beverages to their foreheads.
But that’s changing. Now we recognize that household warmth, far from a necessity, is a fetish, an indulgence. It’s a recent invention of a society grown so soft that its members have forgotten how to kill, gut and don the hide of a wild furry animal. Other than the socialites.
The good news is, there are many very practical steps that ordinary people can take to keep their heating bills reasonable. In my house we keep the thermostat at 48 degrees and then turn it down at night. It’s hard to enter my house because of the towels and spare curtains and stuffed animals crammed by the front door to keep the heat inside. When you do manage to fight your way in, the first thing you see are strange mounds of blankets and clothes in the living room. Laundry? No, my children.
The thermostat stays at 72° during the winter here at Casa NewMexiKen; automatically lowered to 60° overnight. Still, even with our mild winter, nearly $200 for natural gas last month.