Deep cold

Tonight, the temperatures hit a long-time low of eighteen degrees centigrade below zero. If you take into account the wind chill factor , it feels rather like 25 degrees below.
So, there´s the worry about our car battery dying from the cold- the parking lot we have is in an open-sided structure, so, the inside is as cold as it´s outside. Luckily, I don´t think we´ll need the car this weekend, unless something of a professional nature were to creep up. Weekend shopping will, for this weekend, be done by tram, which is quite feasible because our fridge is, happily, well-stocked.
Having to carry all of my purchases at once will, moreover, help me to stick to the essentials, so, it´s also frugal.
Speaking of frugality, in December I got a nice fat refund from the energy provider we use. Too fat to be true, I thought and had the calculation rechecked. Turned out there had been a mixup of gas meters, so, they had erroneously billed me the gas use of another flat that had stood empty half of the year.  So, almost half the refund had to be returned.... What vexes me is that the mistake only became evident because of that big fat zero for the second half of the year´s use. Had the other flat not stood empty, I might have gone on paying somebody else´s gas bill indefinitely and never been the wiser for it.
The lesson from that is that you can´t just rely on your utility bills being correct. Find out the numbers of the meters connected to your flat, and watch how much you´re using.
Having a central heating system for just our flat  was, for me, an important criterion when I was looking for a new flat, because that way, I decide when the heating gets turned on or off, and how high the temperature is set. No haggling with my landlord over heating costs, either. And definitely no paying for any other tenants who believe that the way to regulate room temperature is to heat the place all the way up and then leave the windows wide open.
Having your own closed-circuit heating system with a thermostat that can be set to automatically lower temperatures during the daytime when there´s nobody at home, and at bedtime, can save a lot of money there. As can lowering said thermostat by just one or two degrees. The drop in heating cost is several percent for every degree centigrade less, and besides, we could always wear a sweater or vest if it gets too cold.
After all, the epitome of wasting energy, as defined by some prankster, is "heating up your room in wintertime until it´s as warm as it was during the summer when we complained about the heat and switched the A/C on".
I´d rather wear season-appropriate clothes and save on the cost of heating and air condition.
Come to think of it, even a hundred years ago it would have been sheer luxury to have a room in winter that had temperatures above zero at all. Our grandparents all have stories of windows coated with a layer of ice from the inside, or water pipes frozen up, or washing from a bucket where you had to break the ice first.
Our forebears dealt with that by dressing warmer. Heating up your rooms to the point where you can sit around with just a t-shirt even though it´s freezing outside, to them, would have seemed preposterous.
So, while I dislike shivering as much as anybody else, I still believe that central heating, too, is a commodity that should be used but not overused.
The environment and my purse both agree.


Julia