No, really…
I’m not joking. This is a whine, a complaint about modern houses and then…oh, if you don’t die of boredom before getting to the end you’ll see.
So, I’m cold. Actually, right at this moment, sat in front of my 1600W fan heater which is currently costing me a fortune, I’m not too bad. Fortunately the amount of time I’m in the house is pretty small, and most of that time I’m asleep under my nyummy Duvet (why do Americans tend to put a sheet under the duvet?) but when I’m not I’m cold.
The problem is, wearing a jumper doesn’t help. My hands hurt, a lot, when they’re cold. Cold feet I can deal with, but my hands just flip into an level of pain where I can barely do anything with them. So I like to stay warm*. By warm I’m thinking a house temperature of around 20 degrees C.
*No, I don’t know why Alaska didn’t cause me the same problems, okay?
Unfortunately, our house can’t manage this. If our heating is on for 5 or so hours, the temperature in the warmest room creeps to a staggering 17.4. It won’t get hotter. Won’t. The heating is, to put not too finer point on it, knackered.
It’s been knackered for a while. Like the last house it’s got the stupid ‘ultra-thin-block-really-easily-don’t-work-properly’ modern experiment in heating…
Okay, it appeared, from my visit, that Alaskan houses at least are heated differently, indeed, it earlier knowledge would indicate that America, in general, uses forced air heating (am I right?) but in the UK we tend to use convection heating from radiators. i.e. we pipe hot water round the house into nice lumps of metal in each room which produce heat. This works well… unless… the pressure in the system drops and then not much heat gets pumped round. Our heaters now reach ‘luke warm’. Or, if, like in our last house and in this one, some daft git in the 80s comes up with this ‘fantastic’ idea about heating pipes. That is to make them approximately 1/4 the diameter they used to be…
They’re now thin. No, really thin. No, thinner than that. Modern ultrathin pipes look like this:
I’m not normally this dull. But I’m cold. I’ve been cold for days. I’m cold, and I’ve got no milk, and I can’t go out because the 4th? 5th? visit of the ‘heating engineers’ is scheduled for now. This means that it’s colder even than usual in the house because the heating is off awaiting their illutrious selves and their tools of fixation.
I’m sorry. I felt the need to rant.
In other news, I’ve written to the National Concilation Service about my broken seatbelt (didn’t I warn you this was the most dull post ever)? And I’ve got to sit down and re-read my Critical Evaluation in Adult Nursing essay.
I’ll tell you one thing that scared me yesterday; My nurse I was working with said to me: “So, come on ‘Staff Nurse Kate’, what are you going to do”. I had a patient who was perhaps a little unwell, and my thoughts were correct – although she wanted a manual blood pressure done (which was essentially the same as the machine’s one. I’d normally do that, but since her blood pressure was not dissimilar to previous blood-pressures I was more concerned about her respiratory rate). Anyway, it was a bit unnerving. It was that sudden moment of… you are responsible for this person’s care. You are responsible for the decisions. This is your choice.
It’s good though, because most of my patients have not really been unwell. And, they’re not likely to be – actually – in the ward I’m on. So it’s the first time I’ve had to think about – my patient might be unwell; what should I do now outside of A&E where there’s much more support available.
So there you go. That’s me. Cold and bored this morning.
Yes, most houses in the States that I have lived in use some variety of forced air heating. In hotter climates, the ducts are usually embedded in the ceiling with the reverse being more popular in colder ones. In really posh houses, both ceiling and floor ducts will be used to create the most efficient cycle. In houses without both, though, several problems can crop up, especially in larger houses that use “heat pumps.” My bedroom in Phoenix which had two exterior walls would get incredibly hot in the summer, often over 95 F unless I opened the door and allowed all the heat dissipated from all of the electronics in my room to flow down the hall.