The first attack in this year’s thermostat wars was launched by my partner Mark. He’d turned on the heating in October and suggested that I should deal with the sudden sauna-like conditions by opening the window. Open the window? Quite reasonably, I told him that was utterly illogical. And then he fired a heat-seeking missile of a criticism. “You’re being tight,” he told me.
Now, I don’t remember ever being called tight before. Mark’s previously complained about my over-generous-to-a-fault spirit – I get so worried we won’t have enough food if people come round to eat that we often have leftovers for days – so I didn’t really know how to respond.
If I were attempting impartiality, I’d let you know that he also pointed out he’d only switched the heating on for ten minutes, but this is my side of the story and I’m not going to be troubled by being an unreliable narrator.
Fortunately, the weather rushed to my rescue and our unseasonably warm autumn has led to a truce. But this week we’re facing frost and I – along with more than half of UK couples – are wrapping up ready for battle. The temperatures may be dropping, but I’m planning to layer up with jumpers and slippers rather than whacking up the radiators for another month. The only thing likely to make me soften is if the children start refusing to get out of bed in the morning because it’s too cold – in which case I’ll pop it on for an hour around 6.30am.
Apparently 53 percent of us argue over the thermostat, according to a survey last year from a radiator company. Of those, seven percent argue daily over central heating. For Kath Harris, 69, who lives in Nantwich in Cheshire, it’s been a war of wills for the entirety of her 33-years-and-counting marriage to Paul.
“We moved from Weymouth in Dorset to Cheshire and it felt like the Arctic,” she explains. “The thermostat is in the hallway and four or five times a day, when I walk past, I switch it up. Paul turns it right off. So as soon as there’s a chill in the air, it goes on and off all day long.” I’m impressed by this decades long war of attrition – that’s more than 15,000 turns on the thermostat by each partner at a conservative estimate – but Kath reassures me they do have conversations about the central heating too.
“They come back to the same thing: Paul thinks I should put more clothes on. But it’s not like I’m going round in a bikini. If we don’t have heating on, my nose gets cold and I’m not going to wear a balaclava to read a book. Warmth is a basic need, animals huddle up together, I refuse to be uncomfortable.”
Genevieve’s husband Mark turned the heating on in October, to her horror (David McHugh)It’s an argument that started in her childhood. “It’s always been thus,” she explains. “When I was growing up at home, my dad believed in the cold and even when we had frost inside in Hereford, he’d insist we had all the bedroom windows open at night.”
Across the road from me in East Sussex, my neighbour Allison Burgin, 50, has the reverse argument to me with her husband Simon, who is away on a work trip. They can both control their heating remotely on their phones. “I know Simon turns it down, even when he’s away,” she tells me. “But it’s toasty now, so he obviously hasn’t checked.” She sends me a photo of her thermostat at 21.5 degrees. Her children are teenagers so have an opinion but tells me her son Harry, “is like his dad: he’ll wear shorts all year and not care”.
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Kath believes it’s “a woman thing” and despite me single-handedly disproving any blanket theory, she’s right that the majority of women prefer warmer temperatures.
While financial expert Martin Lewis found that on average people living in the UK want their homes to be 20 or 21 degrees, according to a poll he ran on X, a 2015 study by Dutch scientists suggests that women are comfortable in temperatures between 24 and 25 degrees celsius, which is 2.5 degrees warmer than men. And women’s brains work better in warmer temperatures, according to a 2019 study published in the journal PLOS One. The female hormone oestrogen is seen as a contributing factor to women’s preference for having the thermostat turned up higher, as studies have shown that women feel colder when oestrogen levels peak when they ovulate.
Still, I’m proof this isn’t always the case. It might seem illogical because I absolutely love getting hot in a sauna or sweating from exercise, but I can only sleep in a cool environment. I put it down to the heady combination of perimenopause, Midlands grit and that terrifying winter two years ago when bills soared hugely and our electricity and gas topped £500 a month. I’m scarred. In fact, more than two million households will avoid turning on their heating this year, a rise of 22 per cent from last year according to a September poll of 2,000 people for energy comparison site Uswitch, because of the worry of rising energy bills.
My friend Roisin Montgomery Joynson, 50, also likes it cooler than her husband Stephen in their Hove home. She complains about her home sweltering, while he says he loves comfort. “I’m more in the ‘don’t freeze when you’ve got heating’ camp,” he tells me. “I turn it on remotely when I’m on my way home. I don’t tell Roisin I’ve put it on: I’m not justifying my actions,” he laughs.
“There was frost on the inside of the windows when I was growing up in Huddersfield. We were poor – we used to have to get dressed downstairs in front of the Parkray Stove or it was unbelievably cold. We don’t have to live in those extremes any more: that’s why we work, to not be uncomfortably cold. We don’t use [heating] willy nilly, but I don’t want to freeze, or the children to freeze.”
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Perhaps one day ‘ideal inside temperature’ will be a compatibility question on dating apps.
I ask my husband Mark whether he’d like to give his side of the story. “If it’s cold, we should put the heating on,” he says. He doesn’t elaborate because he doesn’t need to: he’s far more farsighted than I am and this week he signed up to work in shared office space. So when I’m sitting at the kitchen table in February when it genuinely is cold, and I have to rely on stubbornness alone to warm my insides when the heating goes off at 9am at my own insistence, I already know he’ll be sitting at a warm desk with fresh coffee.
It gives me no pleasure to concede his early victory in this winter’s thermostat war.
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