One of life's greatest pleasures is a heated mattress pad. Start it an hour before bedtime and turn it off when you get in. Wonderful to climb into a toasty warm bed and snuggle down under your duvet.

We've made a lot of soup this winter. Delicious and it warms up the house.

we never turned on the heat in my college apt in the midwest...depended on the heat rising from our downstairs neighbors and slept in sweatpants. the bathroom was coooooold though

I don't know. If you're enjoying yourself, keep at it, but it seems a little silly to me to deny yourself at least a reasonably warm apartment when you have the means to get it. I live in Phoenix, so I hardly ever have to use the heater, but we have had a couple of freezes this winter so far. I keep my place at about 60F and wear slippers when I'm out of bed, and snuggle under a down comforter when I'm in bed. Compromise.

Ooooh envy! 21 degrees today. Again, remind me...why do I live in Michigan?

A hot whiskey (whiskey, sugar, a slice of lemon studded with cloves all topped up with hot water) is great for heating you up from the inside out. It's also a great cure for a cold. My great aunt has one every night before she goes to bed, and she's hale and hearty and will be 100 on her next birthday.

When we leave the house, I turn the heat down to 50 so it's not too cold once we get home. But I have an 8 month old, so I can't just forgo the heat...wish I could, it's so expensive!

Sounds like the hell that was college apartments! You'll never find me in that position again if I can help it, but if you were to go back in time it involved lots of cozy slippers, gloves worn indoors, fleece pullovers under hoodies, and sleeping bags on the couch. UGH I'm cold and annoyed just thinking about it.

going without heat would be so awesome! We've been having some very cold winters here (Nebraska) lately so we got a sunheater to help heat our upstairs, it works awesome that way we can turn the heat way down at night

I live in Toronto, where the temperature routinely falls below freezing (it's -5F with the wind chill right now.) I'm able to go without A/C, even when the heat rises to 90/95F, but I keep my place at 20-21C (around 78F). Otherwise it's flat-out just too cold.

Tips - drink lots of tea and other hot beverages, eat hearty and nourishing food (casseroles, stews, soups), layer clothes (tights under pants makes a big difference), good slippers and thick socks, cozy throws/quilts, wearing a scarf around the house, liquor, spicy food. All good things.

I find my office is always cold... I drink lots of tea or just hot water and warm myself from the inside out.

I will not be doing this in Minneapolis. Mostly because my building has a boiler and sometimes I have to open the windows to keep from getting to hot. In January. When it's 0 degrees F outside.

I live in NYC and my apartment is usually nice and toasty...except when it's not! For those times I use my trusty space heater, hot showers, hot drinks/soups, my favorite oversized soft & warm sweatshirt and/or my mukluk slippers which keep the tootsies toasty.

Ok. i find it a little funny that someone living in SanFran is writing an article on keeping warm in winter. However, speaking from the Green Mountains in Vermont I would say: warm socks ,soup & lots of snuggling with each other (& our animals) is how we get through it. Also, the fingerless gloves never come off.

I live in Houston, Texas so...um...yeah...

I've never had to run the heat in my apartment (although it does sometimes get pretty cold inside (~60-65 degrees)) but I've already started running the air conditioning in the morning when I'm getting ready in the bathroom.

Mid-February and running the AC. Imagine that.

I like the nightly whiskey idea and beer at room temp works too.

We eat more nuts and chocolate in the winter because it warms us up. Can't eat them during warm months or we'll burst into flames.

Thermal socks all the time and hot beverages all day will help too.

I'm in So Ca and have the thermostat at 68. It used to be at 70, so we're suffering a bit. :)

I live in a 1930's cottage with only one gas heater - an ugly metal thing on the living room wall - very loud when it turns on. The second the unit turns off you wouldn't even know it was on. Cold! Granted we don't have the severe cold that others have experienced this year, but we have had a couple of teen events. The bed: I don't like flannel so I use very high count cotton sheets (thick!) with 2 light weight down blankets followed by a fluffy light weight down comforter. It doesn't hurt to have a BF and two 65 lb. puppers that like to cuddle! That said...it was 80 yesterday! :)

Push-ups, even just the girly kind against the wall: 10 and I'm warming up.

This is ridiculous, I'm with Sturgeon General on this one.

Knit caps: "If your feet are cold, then put on a hat!"

I'm with mojones - had to turn on the AC this weekend in north Alabama. Ridiculous. Having spent the past three months sans heater, though, in what proved to be a shocking cold winter, I'll echo - layers, layers, layers! And a blanket within reach on all surfaces.

We tried the bubble-wrap on the windows this year, and it works! But now we have bubble-wrap on our windows, which is kind of stupid looking. :(

No way, no how, would I or could I ever consider living without heat.

One of the beauties of the flat I rent here in Germany is I have 24/7 access to heat 12 months out of the year since the apt is heated with gas and each unit has it's own control panel.

The law in Germany is you provide heat until May and then no heat until September.

Hell no, sometimes I get cold between that time of the year.

I'll never forget the first time I turned on the heat in my first apt. I only used it overnight and on weekends and was totally shocked at the $78 increase on my pg&e bill.

I'm now in tiny studio with thin & apparently uninsulated walls that aren't shared with other apts. My space is small enough that a little fan heater can make it unbearably hot after a few hours on high...

I've found some balance by hanging insulated curtains on the walls and beefing up some bottom door draft blockers by stuffing them with a rubber backed rug scraps.

The fan heater is super loud at any temp, so I hope to soon replace it with a parabolic one.

I still love the fact that my apt shares no walls, but that totally exposes it to the cold and wind.

If you have heat, turn it on? seriously

I'm with the others- on both sides. In Miami Beach we almost never need heat, but when it does get chilly, a down comforter is more than enough. Like the other southerners mentioned, I had the AC on last night! But having grown up and lived up north, the poster from Toronto nailed it: tights! Tights under everything. Layering is IMO, the most effective way to stay warm.

It's nice to see that I'm not the only one who freezes! It's gotten below 45 degrees in my apartment. I have a heated mattress pad as well & I love it! Very hard to get out of bed in the morning though:)

My tip: where a scarf or neck warmer. I find that if my neck is warm, I'm warm. I'm not feeling the boots in the house tho...I can only imagine how bad my floors would look. I have trouble keeping up with all the salt and snow tracked in even taking shoes off at the door. Maybe a dedicated pair of house boots? :P

I'll never use a heated electric pad for the bed again, since the time my cats "made muffins" on one (or so I suspect) and caused just enough damage to make it start to smolder and slowly burn. (It probably would have flamed outright, if it hadn't been fireproof). I awoke to the acrid smell of smoke in my nose, and the furry miscreants way on the other side of my rooms, trying to get my roommate to let *them* out to safety. Did they even bother to wake me-- of COURSE not. And I was living on Maui at the time, on slopes of Haleakala...so it was probably a frosty 60 degrees or so.. (ha). Now that I am in San Francisco (and occasionally doubting the wisdom of moving here from Hawaii..brrrrr) -- our recipe for warmth is night caps (of the liquid variety), wool socks, and sparing use of the heater. We have insulating blinds, but I don't think they do much. If I could just find a toilet seat that stays warm (yes, I said it), I'd be alright..

My lease has a clause that I must heat the apartment to at least 55 degrees all winter long. So it's 55 degrees at night and 60 during the day--I have to pay for the oil to heat the place. I keep one room warmer, at 65 degrees, with a space heater, because I work from home and can't type with frozen fingers.

All the hot tea in the world won't keep you warm for long. At some point, everyone gets cold and needs heat. Just my luck that I live where today's high of 30 degrees is a record breaker.

Indoors heat should be kept if needed at about 16 degrees celcius, it save power & wont hurt - put a sweater on.
Here in Melbourne it's meant to be nice & warm & summery, but we actually turned the heating on the other night as it dropped down to about 12C.
I never found one when living in the US, but could you get a hot water bottle? portable & low effort...

After having a $200+ electric bill for keeping the apartment around 68-70, we now keep the place at 55 during the day and 60ish when we're at home. Our walls and windows are poorly insulated, so all the heat seeps out or up for our neighbors. Nashville has been very cold this winter, so I layer up and have a blanket on the couch. We use the space heater for the room we're in, and we have a hot water bottle to warm the bed. Our cat acts like a heating pad as well :)

I've spent half my life on the east coast, growing up and have been in San Francisco for about twenty years now and I can tell you that I've definitely been colder *inside* in San Francisco. If you live in one of those beautiful Victorian flats as I do, you know chilly. Most of those buildings aren't insulated at all and have no storm windows. There's no central heating and the architecture of the homes themselves don't lend themselves to retaining sunshine (think long and narrow). No matter how sunny it is during the day, once that four o'clock fog rolls in, watch out. I have a space heater at my feet right now-- and plastic up on the living room windows. So I don't think it's ridic that an SFer is giving tips on heat. I sleep with a hot water bottle at my feet; helps tremendously. And you know that feeling when it's cold outside and you step into a bookstore or cafe and ah! it's oh so warm inside? Yeah, that doesn't happen here either. It definitely doesn't get cold-cold, but there's not much to keep that cold outside. But on the upside, no salt on the roads to track inside and ruin the floors.

I recently moved to China to teach English with a group of other Americans. Since all of us are used to having plenty of heat and warmth indoors, it has been quite an adjustment to find that our apartments in China are hardly heated. Now we all wear a few pairs of leggings under everything, 2-3 sweaters, and a coat almost all the time. Lucky winter's almost over.

If you can get old estate or stage curtains off ebay and put them up floor to ceiling along the full length of any exterior wall, it keeps the heat in pretty well. Only worth it if you can get them cheap, though. It's what a lot of people living in terrible 50s/60s blocks do round here.

Our house is 1900s and midterrace so we're well insulated, apart from the kitchen leanto which is just a slightly larger fridge (cracked ice on the washing up in there this winter). We wear hats, slippers, and tremendously unsexy wool thermal underwear (but have recently been impressed with the slightly less tragic Uniqlo stuff along those lines). Anyway, thank goodness I am English and allowed to wear tweed and appalling hats, or I would have frozen this winter.

BRRR! I once lived in the mid west in a victorian house for a year. I remember those winter days of seeing my breath inside. What misery -the life sucking, soul searing kind! To this day, I believe that surviving that winter took one year off my lifespan. Never again.

You crazy crazy people. I grew up in the midwest, so I'm no stranger to cold winters (and this one has been particularly brutal), but to deny yourself a warm home just seems strange to me. I feel that my house should at least not want to give me frostbite during the winter months.
That said, my father always tried to freeze us to death in an effort to save money each winter, so now I always keep my place at 70F minimum.

I agree with Trish1980 on this one. I grew up in an old colonial house in New England. It regularly gets cold enough in the winter that if you don't have the heat on AND leave your pipes dripping over night they will freeze and cause an awful lot of damage if they burst. I've seen washing machines and dishwashers decommissioned in the process.

I once rented a drafty little place where my bedroom faced into the wind. I sewed a couple of inches of strong string into a loop at each of two corners of a quilt and draped the loops over two nails at the top of the wall each winter. Amazing difference!

My dad used to freeze us to death, too! In fact, he still does- the heat goes down to 55 at night in sub zero New England. As I am getting ready to move to the warm West Coast, I'm actually leaving a set of warm clothes (long johns, heavy coat) here to save me suitcase space later!

I can handle a temperature that requires us to wear sweaters and slippers. But I would draw the line at seeing breath!

I'll definitely not be doing this unless I happen to live in San Francisco in the future. Until then, Michigan winters are just too cold. I keep my apartment at 73 during the day and 69-70 at night. Even then I'm constantly wearing a million layers.

RE: the boots. These are what UGG boots are made for! They are slippers to keep your feet warm in winter.

It's a constant source of amusement to me that people in other countries wear them out of the house and not just to check the letterbox! ;-P

I have to add my support for the hot water bottle. You can definitely buy them in the US - in some drug stores, or on-line. Fabulous for warming up the bed and keeping toes warm.

Our dog also acts as a living 102-degree hot water bottle.

I grew up using so many of the above tips to save money (my mom was a single parent). As an employed adult, I will never be cold again! I'd rather save money on food instead of heat. That being said, my bf says the temp inside my place reminds him of home (Puerto Rico ;))

womens ski pants
I can handle a temperature that requires us to wear sweaters and slippers. But I would draw the line at seeing breath!

I love going with little to no heat. It's really rewarding when I get my bill each month in the winter times. Plus I feel great knowing that I can still be happy doing without something I used to think was a MUST. :)