Woman Says Her Farmhouse Went Through January On About $5 A Winter For 30 Years With No Furnace Or Space Heater, Then Shows Why Those Little Heaters Just Run Up The Meter

“My mother never paid for heat in her life,” says the woman behind the Frugal Frannie and Vintage Lifestyle USA channel. Her mother’s farmhouse, she says, went through January on about $5 a winter, and her own house has done the same for 30 years.

Snow-covered farmhouses in a valley below a pine forest in winter

The method came down to three things: a kitchen, a south window and a stone that went from the stove into the bed. No furnace, no gas and no space heater.

Those Little Heaters In The Catalog Promise A Whole House For $5, And She Says The Math Is Shy

She has seen the pictures, in her granddaughter’s feed and in a catalog that still arrives with the seed packets. A little heater, a whole house, $5 all winter. They are aimed at people her age, she says, because anyone on a fixed income starts counting toward January in October.

Her answer is simple arithmetic. A small heater, in her words, is “a toaster with a promise printed on the box.” It makes heat honestly, watt by watt, but a watt costs what the power company says it costs, and no shape of box makes it cheaper.

She tried one herself the year the cold came early. It warmed the kitchen fine, and then the bill arrived. She never bought a second one, and she does not blame the heater. It delivered every watt she paid for, and the trouble was that she had imagined it was free.

“A House In January Is Not A Box, It Is A Sieve”

A heater can warm the corner it stands in, she explains, but warm air rises, gathers along the ceiling and slips out through the roof and old walls. An old farmhouse has a hundred quiet places to leave through, so one corner can stay toasty while the back bedroom never knows.

She is honest about her $5. The heat itself costs her nothing, because nobody in the house makes it on purpose. The $5 is what winter adds to her bills over a normal month, such as lights burning longer and the kitchen working harder, and she says she has checked it against the shoulder months for years.

Where does the free heat come from? The low winter sun pours through two south windows from mid-morning to mid-afternoon. Supper, cornbread and a pot of soup simmering all add warmth. And people count too: she says a grown person sitting still gives off about as much warmth as a 100 W bulb.

Her Mother’s Rule: “Heat The People In It And Let The House Keep What It Is Given”

The winter she learned this, fuel prices had jumped and her first baby was small. She sat adding the same column of numbers three times until her mother gave her the sentence she has kept ever since: you cannot heat the whole house, so heat the people in it.

Here is the routine she follows from October to April, in her own order.

Doors first. Pick the rooms you actually live in, such as the kitchen, sitting room, bathroom and bedroom, and shut the rest. She keeps the door to a room with pipes open a hand’s width and opens the cupboards under the sink on bitter nights so kitchen air reaches the pipes.
Then the sun. She opens the south curtains with her first coffee, washes the inside of those windows with vinegar water a couple of times a winter, and lets the light land on something heavy like a floor or table. At dusk the curtains close, and in the worst week she hangs an old quilt over the kitchen windows.
Then the kitchen. She bakes in the afternoon, not at bedtime, with the kitchen door shut so the warmth stays where she sits. She warns never to run the oven with the door open to heat a room.
Then the person. Wool undershirt, wool socks, a knit cap at bedtime and a shawl on the back of her chair. Two thin layers beat one thick one, she says, because you are building pockets of still air.
Last, the bed. About 20 minutes before bedtime a brick or flat stone warmed on the stove and wrapped in flannel goes under the covers. A hot water bottle works too if it is wrapped, tucked at the foot, filled with hot tap water rather than boiling, and replaced when the rubber stiffens or cracks.

Why Old Farmhouses Kept Whole Families Warm In One Or Two Rooms

She says none of this is her invention. In old farmhouses the room with the most windows and the chimney beside it was the keeping room. Families spent winters in one or two rooms, and the front parlor stayed shut with sheets over the good chairs. That was not poverty, she says, “that was arithmetic.”

One fire could bake the bread, cook the beans, dry the wash and warm the people. She notes that stone holds heat for hours while air forgets in about ten minutes, which is why a brick in the bed outperforms a blast of warm air.

People were not tougher then, she says. They were “better arranged,” and somewhere along the way fuel got cheap and the thermostat dial replaced the arrangement.

Try It For One Evening, And Do It Safely

Her test takes about 20 minutes. Stand on a sturdy chair in the bedroom and hold your palm flat against the ceiling for a slow count of five, then hold it at pillow height. That difference is your heat, and your money, sitting where nobody lives.

Then choose your winter rooms, open the south curtains in the morning, cook supper in the afternoon and warm the bed before you climb in. She says not to judge the first night, because by the third morning you will probably have slept straight through.

She is firm about safety. This is not a license to freeze, she says. If you are older, unwell or take medicines that change how you feel the cold, a cold room is a real danger, so keep the rooms you sit and sleep in at a sensible warmth and use these tricks on top of that. Keep any flame or heating element away from anything draped or hung, keep a baby’s bed plain with nothing loose, and know where your water shut-off is.

Finally, she suggests a phone call to anyone who lives alone in a cold house. That call, she says, “heats more than every trick I know.”

Willow and Hearth