Admittedly, the sun is shining directly on my thermometer.

18 degrees.

20.5 degrees.

I'm paying my parents, at whose house I'm staying, £2 extra a day to have the heating on during the daytime.

They’re never charging you for that! You can’t give birth to someone who hasn’t asked for it, and then charge them cost of living fees.

Even when I lived here in the 90s when I was unemployed, I gave them £10pw out of my income support. And then I had no savings or investments at all, the day before my Giro came I'd be down to about 50p.

Now that I'm prosperous, and very well paid, I'm happy to give them our mutually agreed winter rate (including all-day heating) of £70pw.

Well, after all, I might be expected to have my own establishment at my age. They're not obliged to let their middle-aged daughter live with them rent free.

I can’t imagine charging family and friends for what I consider basic hospitality provision (lighting, heating, meals, towels, laundry, etc), and I’d be offended to be charged, but as long as you’re all happy with it that’s the main thing.

I remember finding out that my father and his brothers were expected to pay towards their parents mortgage and bills, like some kind of tithe. My mother told me that when I was a teenager - she’d been so horrified she waited until I was old enough to reveal to me that this levy on existence had been going on. We consider it to be near the top of the list of their crimes, almost symbolic of all the rest.

I do know of an accountant who would make his children work for weekly pocket money, which they then had to pay back to him at a daily rate to get a key to the padlock on the toilet door for 24 hours. Key sharing was not allowed, and none of them would’ve shared it with their siblings anyway. Each had to pay to rent their own jealously guarded key. They lived in Essex.

Our family took this attitude before any of us came to Essex. When my grandad used to take my mum and aunt to stay with his sister in Cornwall, he'd leave a pound note under the clock on the mantelpiece for the extra expenses great-aunt would incur.

18 degrees.

23 C, thanks to the southern aspect referred to in the weather thread.

It was 18 degrees when I got back an hour ago but the heating has since come on and it has so far climbed to 19.

I turned up the Central heating up a whole degree (c) from last year, I'm not having a repeat of last years damp/mould problem.

Looks at heating costs…

Having second thoughts…

Yes, my friend refused to put his heating on to save money and his front door swelled, wrecking the locking mechanism so much that it stopped opening and for a good while he had to use the back door every time to get out of the house and run around the side to receive parcels etc.

I have to do that too, every time it's very hot or there's been a lot of rain.

Last Christmas, I listened to a heating expert's advice and put all the radiators and the hallway thermostat on full but set the boiler to just 30 degrees and left the heat on in every room for 24 hours every day.

If I remember right, it cost around £4 per day in gas to heat the whole house, compared to £8 per day doing the same thing with the boiler set at 70 degrees.

Anyway, just heating one room for 12 hours a day, with the boiler set at 60 degrees, was costing about £2 per day in gas. Therefore, I reverted to just heating the one room.

However, I was impressed by how little it cost to heat the whole house for 24 hours per day once the boiler temperature was turned right down.

Obviously, this only works if one has a condensing combi boiler.

SiberianPrincess’sMidriff wrote:

I turned up the Central heating up a whole degree (c) from last year, I'm not having a repeat of last years damp/mould problem.

Looks at heating costs…

Having second thoughts…

I've been thinking of getting a dehumidifier. They reckon that, if you have one, you can turn the heating down by one degree because the dry air feels warmer.

Dehumidifiers are great if you have damp problems, which we used to.

BUT they cost quite a lot to run.

Tipping the water out of them was very cathartic.