I saw one definition said that being able to afford to have 21C in lounge and 18C in the rest of the house as the line under which it was said that someone was in fuel poverty.

Again it is a difficult question for which I would like to see a simple one size fits all answer

The water used to freeze by my bedside when I was a lad, explains a lot

I think the standard definition is spending more than 10% of your income on fuel. Which makes it difficult to tackle as fuel prices rise.

what is adequately?

I did once see an official table of temperatures and the associated health risks; certain conditions or health problems were exacerbated as temperature increased/decreased. I think the 18C & 21C you've mentioned were cited in that. That's a broad brush obviously but you need some kind of baseline.

<blockquote><cite>Posted By: SteamyTea</cite>Training people to understand domestic heating and the most effective way to use it is, in my opinion, a non starter at the moment. Only have to look on this forum to see how much different good advice is offered for the same problem. What hope does the 'man in the street' have.</blockquote>

Very true. I have tried, many, many times to explain how my programmable thermostat works. It isn't complex, it has a display that gives actual temperature and can be programmed for various target temperatures for different days of the week and times. It is always on, as I just let the 'stat call for heat whenever it's needed, including over night temp reductions etc. It does a pretty good job of maintaining the house at the desired temperature, in conjunction with thermostatic rad valves in all the other rooms. All pretty obvious you'd have thought.

Nevertheless, I still get asked to "turn the heating on" and no matter how I try and explain that the controls are best left to do their own thing the message doesn't sink in. For example, I frequently find that the "increase set temp" button has been repeatedly pushed to get the boiler to come on. I usually find this out when the temp has risen to some ludicrous level, and checking the 'stat shows that target temp has been increased to 30 deg C or some such. The bodge fix is to have a lot of short programmes set, so that any ludicrous temp setting gets cancelled within an hour or so, but one shouldn't need to do this.

We might deride 21C in the lounge as a necessity and when you are active, healthy and relatively young I would agree. When you are elderly, imobile and frail living at 17C will get harder and start to bring about earlier deaths.

Solution could be more sheltered/communal living as many elderly people also live in 'underoccupied' homes

Well, more people will be finding themselves struggling to pay increased fuel prices now that the government have reduced the Winter Fuel Payment by £50.

When I lived in Yorkshire as a kid I distinctly remember the ice on the inside of my bedroom windows!

Rgds

Damon

Actually, our elderly relatives were in their own cosy semi up the road in Dewsbury, or buried in a worrying snow-drift in Swaledale...

Rgds

Damon

After we'd moved here (August 2000), the married daughters of the woman we bought it off came out to see how the place had changed. Their mother had had the c/h fitted in 1997 so they hadn't had the benefit of it. They slept in the 'front' bedroom, which is the coldest room in the house, on a corner with N/NE elevations. It's a big room and they said they used to sleep in a double bed together to keep warm, taking it in turns to sleep in the middle because it was the "snuggest" place.

Condensation used to run down the two large sash windows and pool on the window ledge where it was soaked up by a towel, which in winter was a frozen block by morning. The towels used to be stood next to the fire in the sitting room, in a bucket to hold the thawing water, dry towels left on the windowsill to catch the thawing condensation off the sashes during the day. They had that for the first 18 years of their lives, when they left to get married.

There was just the single open fire in the sitting room, lit when the mother got up and kept in through the day, a throwback to the days when this was a colliery and the husband worked here (and at Alveley when the pit moved across the river and this side closed down in the mid-60s) when they got free coal. There was enough coal left in the cellar to last us through our first winter and we then used up the slack in the stove for the next two years. I think we contributed substantially to the massive global increase in CO2 over those first three years.