For months now, I have been on covert operations, mostly when it is dark. Once the lights are out, I slink around the house, unseen by my husband, turning down the dials on radiators in the sitting room, the TV room, the spare room and the hall. I don’t touch the one in my husband’s office, for tactical reasons.
Occasionally, he’ll pass a radiator, notice it’s set to the snowflake symbol and turn it back up. As soon as possible, I turn it back down.
When he’s out I also tamper with the thermostat, which he will eventually turn back up, triumphantly assuming he has won this latest skirmish, not realising that all my sneaking around the house swivelling radiator dials renders the thermostat largely irrelevant except in his office. Which is why I don’t touch that one.
Sarah Frieze (yes, really) slinks around the house, unseen by her husband, Anthony, turning down the dials on radiators in all the rooms except his – for tactical reasons
Clever? Not always. Once I got the dial in the spare room wrong and jammed it on the highest setting, which broke the mechanism. It cost me an £80 plumber’s visit. Which I managed to keep secret from my husband.
It’s mid-November and already British households are locked in a bitter battle over the heating. A new poll found one in four regularly argue with their partner about the temperature, while 18 per cent get frustrated with family members who tinker with it. If they find out about it, of course.
My husband and I are practical, details-oriented people. We agree on the level of illumination we require as the nights draw in, on the components of our weekly shopping list and on the correct day in December to put up the Christmas decorations. But the heating we fight over.
A poll has found that one in four couples regularly argue about the temperature in the home, while 18 per cent get frustrated with family members who tinker with it (posed by models)
My daughter and I call it The Cold Wars, and they rage in our house along strict, although unconventional, gender lines.
Research published in 2019 showed men and women generally want different things when it comes to ambient indoor temperature. Overall, Professor Nicole Sintov, of Ohio State University, found women tend to the warmer end of the gauge compared to the often chillier preferences of men.
It’s a difference that’s long been the subject of office wars, too.
In 2015, a paper titled ‘Overcooling of offices reveals gender inequity in thermal comfort’ showed thermostats were set in office buildings according to a 1960s formula based on the heat needs of a 40-year-old man weighing 11 st.
Men function better at a cooler temperature, apparently, while women perform at higher levels on mental tasks when warmer, meaning the corporate thermostat traditionally favoured the perfect male working environment at women’s expense.
‘We are now seeing this in family conflicts about temperature, where it’s possible that women are losing the thermostat battle,’ says Prof Sintov. ‘This hints at a status quo gender bias in heat settings that leads to a home thermal environment that does not cater to women’s preferences.’
Well, some women. Perhaps Prof Sintov would like to come and study us, for in my house the exact opposite is true. I’m far tougher in the cold than my husband Anthony. And while our 21-year-old son loafs about in bare feet and a T-shirt, shivering like a whippet and complaining about the cold, my daughter – a 23-year-old climate change warrior and charity shop devotee – is dressed in second-hand tweeds and natural-fibre jumpers, and wraps herself in a duvet if all else fails. Given half a chance, she too will spin the dial down.
My husband, by contrast, is a tropical flower. Where I like the thermostat at a brisk, economic 17c, he turns it up to a milk-curdling 24c (according to this week’s poll, the ‘ideal’ temperature for your home is 19.5c).
I dread the day he signs us up to one of the app-controlled heating systems and gets to control the thermostat from afar, which is what happens to my shivering friend Deborah. ‘I turn it up because I’m the one at home freezing and he monitors it via the app from work and turns it down. It’s a yo-yo battle!’
To be fair, my husband has two credible defences: he is Australian-born, and he pays the heating bills. Not that I pay nothing. We split our outgoings fairly evenly, but the things I pay for – supermarket shops, TV subscriptions and water bills – cause no similar dramas.
I’m a loving enough wife that I don’t want outright conflict, so I fight back with guerilla warfare. We live in a narrow terraced house. My husband insists that near the bottom of the house you have the radiators on in all rooms because they warm the upper floors. A particular front line is the big radiator in our hall, which belches heat into the street with every opening of the front door.
‘Hot air rises up the stairwell,’ states Anthony firmly.
A bone of contention between Susannah and Anthony is the radiator in the hallway, which belches heat into the street with every opening of the front door
‘Thermal convection replaces the colder air of the street with the hot air of our hall,’ I fire back.
Ah, these winter nights of warming banter and debate.
Hostilities were thawed by buying him a crimson and white thick fleecy throw to ‘wear’ indoors instead of relying on hothouse heat levels. At first, he wasn’t impressed, but when I told him how regal it was and how well it suited him, he relented.
The news that we could try to claim household expenses because we were working at home pleased him. ‘My employer would be paying for us to be warm enough in the office,’ he crowed, ‘so they can pay for us to be warm enough at home!’
But I was ineligible because I am freelance, and his relief (given by the Income Tax Earnings & Pensions Act 2003) was capped at £244 per year with a ton of paperwork which even he didn’t think was worth the effort.
Susannah suffers from cold feet, but her husband objects to her friendly suggestion that they practise thermal convection under the sheets
It has taken a family meeting and a poker-based negotiation – ‘I’ll see your 17 degrees, and I’ll raise it to 19 degrees’ – for us to reach a compromise, helped by the fact we now have low-cost underfloor heating in the kitchen with a separate thermostat set to 18.2c by our builders that none of us yet knows how to change.
So now I work in a steady state of happiness round the kitchen table in our basement, and his lordship reigns over his thermostat set at 22c in solitary splendour on the ground floor upstairs.
Our only place of real peace is in the bedroom, which neither of us like to heat, preferring a cold nose and a thick duvet.
But then there are Cold Feet Wars. For an otherwise hot-blooded person, I have the cold feet of a turtle. For some reason, my husband objects to my friendly suggestion that we practise thermal convection under the sheets. ‘No, I don’t want your cold feet jammed into my warm calves,’ he grumbles.
For now, I shall continue the low-level resistance – and with gas prices rising, hope to press my advantage by Christmas.
ANTHONY WRITES:
There were moments in the early days of the thermostat wars when I allowed my wife’s arguments to persuade me that turning down the heating was both good for us and for our wallets.
The trouble was we both looked like Soviet-era gulag prisoners, wrapped in layer upon layer, topped with hoods and scarves. Not only did I find it hard to bend my arm enough to type, but opening the door to the countless deliveries we get for a houseful of people working from home just became embarrassing.
In the early days of the thermostat wars with Susannah, Anthony says they looked like Soviet-era gulag prisoners, wrapped in layer upon layer, topped with hoods and scarves
Delivery driver, outside, lightly clad in branded fleece and slacks, astonished at Siberian parcel recipient, inside, reaching out with hands blue-tipped in fingerless gloves.
‘You all right, mate?’ they would ask. ‘Boiler on the blink?’
She’s right to say things looked up when she bought me my ermine-trimmed robe. It wraps right around my chilled kidneys, and makes me feel like an eccentric aristocrat in his unheatable Scottish castle. And it can easily be flung aside when the doorbell goes for the 100th time in a day.
What Susannah hasn’t gone into – since she revolts against the modern tendency to ‘blame’ everything on the menopause – is that her natural body temperature is rather higher than it was. Hot flushes mean we are not operating on a level playing field.
Not that I’d ever be foolish enough to bring this into the thermostat wars. If I know anything about the menopause, it’s that you pick your battles carefully.