Many people remember the coldest times of their lives as the years when they attended college, lived in off-campus housing, and couldn’t afford to properly heat their rental house or apartment. That’s definitely the case with alums of Midwestern colleges such as Ohio University and Ohio State.
Many Bobcat and Buckeye alums probably wish someone had advised them on how to keep warm during the frigid Ohio months without blowing all their money. That being the case, we’ll try to correct that gap in knowledge among current college students. Following are some proven tips for staying warm without going broke this winter in your off-campus lodging.
How to Stay Warm on a Budget
• Turn up the thermostat as high as it will go. NOT. Don’t do this since it could break your heating system (overworking a furnace or a heat pump is a good way to stop getting any heat at all). It also will result in a shockingly high gas and/or electric bill at the end of the month. Unless you’re made of money, being obliged to pay a $400 gas bill is something to be avoided.
• Find the lowest temperature that you and your housemates can live with and then stick with it. This will be a lot easier if you wear sweaters or sweats inside the house rather than loafing in front of the TV wearing only your briefs or skimpy nightgown.
• If you and your housemates decide that you can handle 66 degrees F during waking hours, for example, you should be able to agree to a lower temperature (say 63) during sleeping hours. Most people prefer to snuggle under a pile of blankets during the winter.
• Designate one housemate to keep track of the thermostat setting. If the rental house in Columbus or Athens comes equipped with a programmable thermostat, learn how to use it. One thing you definitely want to avoid is constantly changing the setting on the thermostat, whether it’s just you or some assortment of housemates. This results in inconsistent temperatures and poor indoor comfort, while wasting energy and stressing the heating equipment.
• Make things easier for the heating system in your off-campus rental, by taking common-sense steps to avoid heat loss. Examples are keeping doors and windows tightly closed and finding and sealing air leaks in the rental’s outer parameter. While the latter is properly the role of the rental company or landlord, if you find a place where you can feel cold air entering your rental, try sealing it with caulk or spray foam. At the very least you can let your landlord know that the rental is poorly sealed.
• Off-campus student neighborhoods in both Athens and Columbus are full of older homes that have been converted to rentals. Many still have single-pane windows that do a very poor job of keeping heat in and cold out. You can add a layer of protection by buying plastic film at a home improvement or hardware store and applying it to single-pane windows. (Ask the rental manager if that’s OK for you to do.)
• You can better afford a comfortable thermostat setting when your rental home is occupied if you turn down the heat when nobody’s home. For instance, in the morning before everyone leaves for class, try turning the temperature down to 60. There’s no reason why the furnace or heat pump needs to be running constantly if no one is home. Then the first person who comes home in the afternoon won’t need a reminder to turn the heat back up – it will be so cold they should react immediately.
• If your place has a programmable thermostat, you and your housemates can devise an energy-saving schedule, with the heat returning to a comfortable level shortly before you expect to arrive home in the afternoon. Plus you can program temperature changes to match your household’s sleep schedule. Many of these devices are WiFi enabled, meaning you can adjust settings remotely from your phone or laptop. If you and your housemates have unpredictable or wildly variable schedules (not a rare thing among college students), you might decide to just stick with manual thermostat adjustments. If you go this route, designate one person to perform this job consistently. Having constant thermostat adjustments from different people (or the same person) will hurt home comfort and potentially damage the equipment.
• Before you actually move into a rental house or apartment, you can be proactive. Prioritize housing options that won’t leave you freezing all winter while paying high heating bills. Some prospective tenants even ask to look at heating bills from the past few years to get an idea of what they’ll be paying. Older homes typically are harder and more expensive to heat than newer ones, though you can’t always depend on that.
• Similarly, all else being the same when looking at housing options, choose the alternative where the landlord is paying utilities. This will allow you to stay as warm as you like without worrying about all this stuff, except… Well, except that saving energy is a worthy social and environmental goal. So no matter who’s paying the heating bills, it’s irresponsible to crank the thermostat up to 75 all winter when you’d be perfectly comfortable with it at 70.