In Which We Find.....

The latest day EVER that we've turned on the heat.

I know.. I post about this every year.. but I'm just amazed! We started living on our own in 1997. During the first 7 years.. October 1st was "turn on the heat day". Some years, it was a stretch to make it to October 1st. One year, it was so miserably cold I had to turn it on the 3rd week in September. In 2005, the heat didn't go on until October 12th, and I was grateful. It was the first year we didn't run out wood stove (it's older than me, and in bad shape) and I wasn't looking forward to how cold the house would be. We had some heating work done that year, and some new radiators installed in rooms that didn't previously have some.. and it wasn't too bad.




Last year, the heat went on October 8th. We discovered some tricks to keeping the cold out around the old, original windows, and turned the heat on, amazed still at how late in the season it was. See, in order to prolong the "non-heating of the house".. it needs to stay fairly warm out at night. I can throw open the windows during a warm day and let the warmth in.. but once the nights start getting cold, it's all over. We have 2 cellars in our house, that have dirt floors and granite walls. The rest of the house sits on dirt crawl spaces. Once it gets cold at night, the temperature in the house just keeps dropping.

Last night I went to bed and it was 67.3 degrees out in the kitchen/family room area (coldest part of our house.. of course.. because we spend the most time there). This morning when I woke up at 5:30 (The Boy and Mr. Man left at 6 to go to Deerfield Fairgrounds for an Amateur radio fest. Geeks) it was 60.1. Way too cold!! There's no way to bring it up from there more than a few degrees without the heat. So today I will vacuum out the radiators and clean and hatch up the windows. I'll turn the heat on before I head out to do errands (let that "dusty hot smell" burn off while I'm not in the house about to have the beginnings of an anxiety attack) and when I come home it will be toasty warm again.

Next year we hope to replace the old wood stove with a brand new pellet stove. There is a lot involved in that, from getting the chimney fixed to doing some work on the kitchen. So, we'll see.
p.s. That's the same tree from the other day's post