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Old 10-21-08, 03:08 PM   #9
IndyIan
Lurking Renovator
 
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We heat with wood so we keep our place between 58F (cold enough that making a fire seems like a good idea) and maybe 68F (when we quit adding wood). For some stretches when its really cold outside we'll have the fire going for a few weeks at a time, not full roaring, but banking the coals at night so we don't have to relight it.
I find having to exert a small amount of physical effort is a great moderator on how warm the house "must" be. Also with the wood stove you can just stand in front of it for a couple minutes and get warmed up regardless of what the house is at.
We also have the window open a crack in our bedroom down to the 30's F outside, so maybe its in the 40's inside sometimes, I've never bothered to check. Fresh cool/cold air is good for sleeping!
Neither one of us is "skinny" so the low temperatures don't bother us to much, some of our "delicate" friends can't handle it so we throw some logs on before they show up.
In a well insulated open concept house with thermal mass(we have a concrete main floor), heating with a woodstove isn't really a big pain in the butt, we don't burn very much wood and there are no big temperature fluctuations. It took a couple years to figure out how to run the stove well and get our wood handling figured out but now its pretty painless. We save alot of money for a bit of labour, or its like having a part time job that pays $50-75 an hour...

Higgy,
Try one of the oil filled radiators for your living room, we use a couple as back up for our wood heat if we are going to be gone for a weekend. They are silent and have a low surface temperature.

Ian
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