Time to share our heating for the last two winters. Here's a graph of our daily gas usage in cubic meters (red line) and heating degree days (above 15.5°C, yellow line), both averaged every 10 days:
My Wife's cousin lives next door and our gas meters are in the same box, so I record both to compare. The cousin's gas usage is the blue line on the graph above. Her house is larger than ours, but it is much newer (built 10-15 years ago, instead of over 40) so its insulation should be better. Well, it appears it's not, or they just don't care to save energy. I crunched some numbers for the last two heating seasons (Oct.01-Apr.01) and it turned out that there were slightly less (about 1%) heating degree days in 2010-2011 than in 2009-2010, and our gas consumption dropped by 11%, while the cousin's usage
increased by 5%! Wow
Here is the data:
| Oct.01-Apr.01 | winter 2009-2010 | winter 2010-2011 |
| HDD (15.5°C) | 2732.8 | 2694.3 |
our gas usage
m3 (therms) | 1736 (632) | 1561 (568) |
cousin's gas usage
m3 (therms) | 2288 (833) | 2400 (874) |
Our 11% reduction is due mainly to keeping the house's temperature slightly lower, just enough to keep the Wife and Dad-in-law from complaining too much
I'm pretty anal with the thermostat - switching to night mode 1-2 hours before leaving the house, keeping at a lower temp in the morning until Dad-in-law gets up, keep it cooler whenever I'm alone at home, not raising the temp if we're at home for only 1-2 hours, etc. The only ecorenovation was
insulating our rood exit hatch. I noticed that there was much less condensation on it this winter, but I doubt that it made any noticible dent in our usage. I also set the
boiler to a slightly higher temperature so that it on for a shorter time.
The cousin, on the other hand, didn't even reduce her house's temperature when they went skiing for over a week
No wonder they're complaining about the gas bill
