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Interest | Anything Goes... || Exit | Areas of
Interest | Anything Goes... |Dear Tippmann:
Here are my suggestions:
Wear a knit cap to cover your forehead and ears. By keeping your forehead warm, you can actually keep your whole body temperature slightly higher than with your forehead cooler.
Wear a scarf or muffler (not the kind on motorcycles) around your neck to keep your neck area warm. Turtle neck sweaters are nice to wear during winter. By keeping your neck area warm, you feel warmer than you actually are.
Wear a pair of gloves or mittens while you don't need to use your fingers for delicate manual work.
Wear an additional pair of socks (preferably mountaineering type) over your regular socks and wear a pair of shoes or moccasins.
Wear a pair of sweat pants over your regular pants.
Raise the temperature settings of both refrigerator and freezers. The ambient temperature will be lower in the winter; therefore, the refrigerator and freezer don't need to work as hard as during the summer. If you don't raise the temperature settings, the temperature inside the refrigerator and freezer will be lower than it needs to preserve the items inside. The optimally adjusted temperature in the refrigerator and freezer will lessen the cooling of the ambient air when you open the doors to the refrigerator and freezer. Of course, you will save electricity as added bonus.
Do not open the refrigerator and freezer doors unless you absolutely have to. When you have to open either door, make sure you know what you need to get and how you reach them before you actually open it, and keep the amount of time the door is open to the absolute minimum. When you open either door, open it gently. Do not swing them open too quickly or too wide. That will get too much cold air out to the room, thus lowering the air temperature of the whole room.
When you cook, use the heat to warm your hands. While cooking, savor the warmth. You'll need occasional luxury of actually heating some of your body parts to stay strong mentally, and getting the heat during cooking does not cost any additional electricity or gas. During cooking, if you can avoid using it, do not use a ventilation fan. The idea is, of course, to keep every ounce of heat in the room (produced from your own body temperature and cooking) stay in the room.
If you really want to get serious about saving heat, disconnect the wires of the ventilation fan in the bathroom to keep whatever heat you may have in the bathroom. Coping with the odor problem is your problem, not mine.
And start taking vitamin C everyday to ward off cold during the whole winter. You'll need it.
Good luck!
Julian
Addendum 1
Before putting socks on, rub your feet (especially toes) vigorously with your hands until they feel warm, then quickly put socks on. The extra heat generated through friction and increased blood circulation will help your feet get a good start in keeping them warm inside socks.
In harsh, cold environments, it's imperative that you wouldn't let the coldness get to you mentally. At the first sign of your extremities (hands and feet) getting cold, do something about it before it gets worse. Jumping up and down helps if the sign is mild. If it severe, you have to take socks and gloves off and rub your feet and hands vigorously before putting socks and gloves back on.
Julian
Addendum 2
Five causes of heat loss from your body:
Do not overdo exercising (e.g. jumping up and down) to raise the body temperature; too much exercising will deplete your stored energy (calories) and sweating will result in eventual body temperature loss due to evaporation of the sweat.
Cover your mouth and nose with a piece of cloth (e.g. scarf and muffler) to reduce the heat loss due to respiration.
If the above do not help, call 911!
Julian
Addendum 3
If you drink hot beverage more than once a day, get a good quality thermos. Everyday, when you want the first cup of hot beverage, boil enough hot water for all the hot beverage you are likely to consume that day and keep it in the thermos. As the need for an additional cup of hot water arises, get the hot water from the thermos. Each time you boil water in a container (e.g. kettle and saucepan), you end up using energy (electricity or gas) to heat the heat-element of the oven-top and the container before you actually start heating the water. By consolidating several short water-heating sessions for a day into one long session, you save energy because you need to heat the heat-element and the container of water just once.
During a shower, turn off the water when you lather up. You will use less water (=less gas to heat the water) and less soap.
During a shower, do not sing. Your purpose of taking a shower is to get yourself clean as fast as you can in a minimum amount of time, not to have a relaxing, good time.
Plan using hot water in the bathroom (especially from shower), so you and your roommates take turns without long pause in between. The idea is that by keeping a pause between turns short, the amount of heat of hot water lost due to its contact with a cold water piping between bathroom faucet/shower nozzle and the water heater will be kept to the minimum.
Julian