Living in rented accommodation can feel like a constant low-key battle. Sharing space, dealing with cowboy agencies, getting basic shit fixed in a timely fashion… And then winter happens and you get to deal with it all in the freezing cold, because your place is owned by someone who’d rather wang on about the youth’s obsession with avocados than install some decent insulation.
Even though you’re handing over a fat wodge of cash every month for the privilege of living in your igloo, the downside is that you probably can’t take any drastic measures to improve its temperature. But there are plenty of things you can do.
The quick fixes
If you’re reading this article you probably don’t need to be patronised with stupid advice like ‘wear an extra jumper!’, so let’s just get straight to it. Your biggest enemy is draughts. Cold air can find its way inside in all kinds of insidious ways, so keeping it at bay is the best thing you can do to keep your place toasty (and eliminating draughts can shave 10% off your energy bills, too). Landlord-friendly fixes are usually pretty cheap and easy.
Rugs are the best thing you can do for crappy wooden floors. For doors, make a DIY draught excluder, or if you can’t be arsed with that, install a brush strip to the bottom of the front door and use foam strips to plug any gaps (Wilko is your friend for all this stuff). Letterboxes and keyholes are also major cold spots – you can buy clip-on/temporary flaps for these, but if you don’t use them, just tape ‘em up.
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and assume you probably don’t have double glazing. It’s always worth asking your landlord about it (the squeaky wheel gets the grease, as they say), but as many think you should be content simply having panes of glass in the window frames at all, you’ll have to take matters into your own frozen hands. A pair of thick curtains will help keep the chill out of the room, but make sure they don’t obscure any radiators, which for some baffling reason always seem to be placed under windows. Plug up any gaps in the frames with tissue or blu-tack, and buy some insulating window film, which is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a ballache to put on, but it really does make a difference to heat loss – and it’s temporary, so your landlord can't say anything.
Once you’ve tackled the draughts, you want to work on maximising the heat you do have. First up, bleed your radiators so they’re working as efficiently as possible. This is a super easy job, I promise – there are loads of tutorials on YouTube. Then give them a boost by installing some radiator reflector foil behind them (although tbh, regular tinfoil works just as well). This helps push the heat into the room, instead of it being absorbed by the wall.
Finally, if you can, rearrange your furniture so that there’s nothing obstructing them. This isn’t going to be possible if you live in a matchbox of course, but even moving furniture just a couple of inches away will help heat flow better.
Schooling your housemates
I used to live with a guy who kept the flat at the same temperature as the surface of the sun and then left the windows open ‘because he liked the breeze’. So yeah, housemates can be as big a challenge to winter warmth as the weather itself. The main problem is that there’s a lot of fake news about the cheapest and most efficient ways to keep warm, and everyone has their own opinions. So here are the facts, backed by SCIENCE (and the Energy Saving Trust).
Understanding your boiler’s settings will save you a whole heap of cash. Setting it to come on for sustained periods of a few hours when you need it (in the morning and evening, for example) is loads better than having it on for short random bursts. But not everyone in your house will have the same schedule, so then what? Those little plug-in space heaters are pretty inefficient, so instead of running one for long periods it’s better to keep the central heating on a low setting throughout the day (like 18°C), and turning off the radiators in rooms that aren’t being used (although a quick five-minute blast from a heater in the morning to get you out of bed isn’t the end of days).
Also, as a household you create a lot of heat without actually realising it. Showering, cooking, doing the laundry and stuff like that all generates bonus heat that can help warm up your place, so make the most of it. Leave the oven door open after cooking, let hot bathroom air into the hallway, keep the kitchen door open when the tumble dryer’s being used, and so on. Make the most of every precious degree C.
What does the law say?
Your landlord is legally obliged to ensure your property is safe and habitable. Of course, some landlords like to play it fast and loose with these terms, but in this context it means that at the very least there needs to be a functioning heating system. Thanks! So vague! Still, there are a couple of legal requirements that you should know about. The first is that landlords are not allowed to say no to requests for energy efficiency improvements if there’s financial support available for them, so check out local council funding or national grant schemes if you want to make a case for something.
Secondly, from April 2018, landlords aren’t allowed to rent out places that fall below new minimum efficiency standards. Some statistics show this will affect as many as one in 10 properties, because so many landlords don’t even know what energy efficiency rating their property has. Again, this could be worth investigating if you think your flat falls short.
Finally, if you’re responsible for paying gas and electricity bills directly to the provider, you’re allowed to change supplier if you want. There are loads of comparison sites online that’ll tell you how much money you can save if you decide to switch (which is really easy, by the way), so at least you can take some of the financial sting out of keeping warm.
And by the time you've done all that, it'll be spring.
