I am very sad that this week was a dud for practicing no heat. It was much too warm. (So we are extending the challenge: Pick a colder night in the coming week to turn the power off, if you haven't already.)
This winter isn't typical, most winters we have a week or two of 20 degree weather, so we all need to plan for that as well. I feel bad I scheduled the challenge for such a mild week!
Here are reports back from my ward members:
"We did the no heat challenge last night. We put the thermostat to 40 degrees and opened the windows in the master bedroom. The house only got to 63 degrees. The kids were nice and bundled, so I don't even think they noticed. My husband loved sleeping with the windows open. It was quite refreshing and we were not cold at all. He wants to do this again when it is actually cold outside." R.M.
"I turned down our heat when I got home from work yesterday and turned on the fireplace. Our house never got below 70 degrees. At 10:00 we turned off the fireplace before going to bed and the upstairs never dropped below 68 degrees. The master bedroom was a little cooler just because we sleep with the door shut, but the kids' rooms were still toasty. I actually prefer to sleep when it is cooler. I think the low cloud cover last night held a lot of the heat in." M.A.P.
"The 'sleeping without heat' experience made me thankful for NC winters--as least this one. With the heat off Thursday night, the inside of the house never fell below 65 degrees- about 1 degree lower than we usually sleep with! We opted not to open the windows so it could have cooled off more than that. After reading the blog we did do a check to see if our gas log would ignite with the power off. Lucky for us, it did!!
At least we have a back up source of heat (--although most of it would escape upstairs.) We have experienced sleeping with kerosene heaters and no electricity for many nights when we lost power in an ice storm in Indiana many years ago. Luckily it was in March, so not as cold as it could have been in Dec or Jan.
Looking forward to the next challenge!" K.B.
"Well, we did do the challenge, much by "accident" (for lack of a better word). I had turned off the heat Wednesday morning thanks to the beautiful warm afternoon we were expecting. We did our daily routine and went to bed as usual, when we woke up the next morning we all noticed it was much cooler than normal, because I didn't turn the heat back on... So, I figured I would just add an extra layer of clothes to everyone and kept the heat off until 3:30 that afternoon, just to ensure we did a whole 24 hours. I don't know if it really counts, but I believe we are adequately prepared for milder weather. We've all had to toughen up a bit since our move from CA, I typically have the heat at 74 (I expect that to change next winter), haha!! " S.R.
"We did ours on Thursday night. We figured out that my husband and I keep each other warm and that is an advantage over the kids. We had them with three blankets each and we just had our normal everyday blanket. We did have everyone sleep with full daytime clothing on and socks. Most of the kids said they slept fine. We told them though that for the future if they get cold to go to one of their brothers beds that is full/queen and then they can heat up with body heat too. This would not be enjoyable at all if this went on for days though. But very doable for one night." B.D.
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