Winter Is the Cruelest Month

Battling the Cold to Reduce My Personal Energy Use

It was a winter night at the end of 2000 or the beginning of 2001, and I was huddled under a blanket with one light on, trying to read and ignore the fact that I was freezing. This was the winter of the California energy crisis that would lead to the recall of then-governor Grey Davis and the election of the Governator, Arnold Schwartzenegger. I wasn’t shivering in the dark, not turning on lights or the heater, because I was worried about a high electricity bill — for some reason, I didn’t feel a huge difference in my monthly costs during the crisis — I was doing it to save energy because Governor Davis asked me to. It was a pretty miserable winter, one where I went to bed early and didn’t feel like I was taking life by the horns. After that winter, I vowed that I would allow myself the small luxury of heating my apartment.

Fast forward 21 years later to December 2021, when I was again shivering in my apartment, trying not to turn on the heater, this time because I knew that home heating is one of the biggest contributors to residential energy use. This is probably less true in California, where the winters are considered mild, but in December 2020, I had used more electricity in a month than I ever had in my life, with my kilowatt total nearly three times my monthly average. My power use has always been higher in the winter months, but December 2020 was the first properly cold month that I was working from home, and I essentially had the heat (from a noisy wall heater) running all day except when I was in a meeting. I was determined not to use that much electricity in future winters.

However, I had a number of factors working against me. First, I run cold in general, and when I work from home, I’m just sitting at a desk, not moving enough to create natural warmth. Second, my apartment is old enough to be rent controlled, so I imagine the inside of my walls are just clouds of pink dust from disintegrated insulation and the exoskeletons of dead ants. Third, although I have a west-facing window that makes things nice and toasty the rest of the year, the sun peaks too early in the winter and so there’s at most a few minutes of direct sunlight when I need it most. Thus, I realized that I needed more of an arsenal for my war against the cold.

I have this thing about dressing for work, which I did even during the Covid lockdowns. It helps me create a boundary between work and home, which is hard to do when working remotely in a small space. I don’t wear jeans except on Fridays, and so there’s no way I could wear my fluffy bathrobe during the day and feel like I should be working. Puffer jackets are basically the outerwear equivalent of jeans, so I repurposed a peacoat to be my dedicated workwear outer layer. It’s always hanging off the back of my office chair so I can slip it on as soon as a start to feel chilly. I also have a dedicated scarf, hat, and fingerless gloves that I keep near my desk for the same purpose. (The hat always comes off during meetings.)

I also have other layers, like puffer vests, blankets, and, best of all, a quilted poncho that help me stay warm when I’m not working or working at my desk after hours.

Wall heaters use a lot of electricity, so smaller items that dispense heat sometimes appear in articles about bringing down electricity bills. I didn’t want to get a space heater since there’s really no place to put it, but since I needed a footrest for my home office, I splurged and got one that was heated. My feet are the hardest to warm up, so on some days when my toes are still icicles despite numerous layers of socks, the heated footrest comes to the rescue. I also had to get a heating pad to help with pain after I got hit by a car, so that, too, is available to warm up my lap or back — or even my sheets before bed!

Despite the curtains on my window, I was still feeling a draft. The culprit was the front door, which is directly to my left with nothing to break the air that comes through it. (My apartment door is close to an exterior door that leads to the patio, so it’s more exposed than doors to apartments that are in the middle of the hallway.) I hung curtains in the jam between the foyer and the main living area, and they now catch some of the cold air that wafts in.

I now truly have an appreciation of the benefit of tapestries in the castles of Europe. I might just hang one up on the wall behind my desk! All in all, my arsenal of cold-battling weapons hasn’t completely kept me from succumbing to the allures of the wall heater, but I succumb much less. My energy usage was still high this past December, but it was more than 100 kilowatts lower than my peak in December 2020. I’ll take that as a win.

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