Heat vs. Hot Water

Why you should turn (or leave) the thermostat down (or off) before taking a shower.

This is an entry for my house-owning and home-repair minded readers.

Madrid's temperature differentials continue to confuse me.  According to the internet, the lows in Madrid and New York are about the same this week (around 2-4 C, or mid-thirties F), but the highs are vastly different.  New York today has a low of 3 and a high of 9 (Celsius) and Madrid has a low of 4 and a high of 18.  (Or between about 37 F and about 48 F vs. between about 39 F and about 65 F.)  Aside from the fact that this makes it difficult to dress properly (except "like an onion" as one Spaniard picturesquely put it), it also makes turning on the heat an interesting conundrum.  At night, I'm snuggled under lots of quilts, and quite warm even with the thermostat turned down to about 10 C.  In the late afternoon, I hardly need the heat on at all.  Unfortunately, the coldest part of the day is the morning, generally between 7:00 and 10:00 AM which makes getting up at a reasonable hour even harder than normal for me.  I thought I had worked out a system, but in a new apartment with a new heating system you learn something new every day.

Here's the boiler.  Working away.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, I have a boiler/hot water heater which can be changed at the touch of a button from being a hot water heater, to being a boiler, to being both.  The "boiler" action heats water for steam in a set of pipes which run to radiators in every room.

As best as I can figure out, the radiators work like standard steam heat radiators in old New York apartments, except they're linked to an individual apartment boiler instead of a central one somewhere in the basement of a bigger building.  (I am working on figuring out how to turn off the radiators in the laundry and extra bedroom when not in use for the sake of saving energy.  Logically, I think the valves should be screwed closed, but as I haven't had the heat running for long enough to work out whether they're just off because of the thermostat it's still a work in progress.)

Here are the (retrofitted) pipes for heating.

In any case, the entire heating set up is on a thermostat in the living room, which can be set to the temperature you desire.  (This is kind of a luxury for me since at home I'm stuck with central heat that I can't control, and end up suffocating in winter because the maintenance people in my building apparently think "room temperature" is 80 degrees.)

I know that Americans have a terrible reputation for wasting energy, and furthermore, as I did not know the exact amount I would be paying for gas and electricity (except that they are apart from my rent), I have been trying to economize, for reasons of environmentalism, budgeting, and avoiding national stereotype.  Until a few days into November I just managed to leave the windows open during the warm part of the day, and to the kitchen warm with evening cooking, and not turn the gas on at all, but in the last week I have been experimenting, and have come up with the following system.  Turn the thermostat down to 10 degrees at night just before going to bed.  Turn it off in the morning if I'm heading out to yoga or the university or generally going to be out all day, and then turn it up to room temperature when I get home in the evening (when it's generally the warmest part of the day anyway, so the boiler has relatively little work to do), and leave it at room temperature until bed time (generally about six hours).

This works fine for week days (and as the temperature never goes below freezing I don't worry about the pipes), but on weekends, when I'm home during the day, I think I will be forced to adopt a variant.  This morning I turned up thermostat to 19 degrees on the way to the shower, looking forward to having a nice hot shower to raise internal temperature, and then enjoy nice warm air afterward.  Shall we say that I was not pleased when after about twenty second of nice hot water the water became tepid again?  I finished shampooing my hair very quickly, since I fortunately realized what was wrong right away.  The friends who had invited me for lunch on Thursday had also been concerned about the lack of radiating heat in the evening when their kids were taking baths, and had commented that perhaps running the bath water was depleting the heat.  It occurred to me (rapidly, before the water went cold) that the problem with combining a boiler and a hot water heater is that if there are demands for hot water for the radiators, you have that much less hot water for the shower, and the heater cannot work fast enough to supply both.  I haven't had a problem with hot dish water in the evenings, but that's because I wash dishes - and do evening showers - after the heat has been on for a while the system is basically at rest and doesn't require more than occasional boosts to the equilibrium.  Turning up the heat requires a boost of hot water which the water heater cannot handle simultaneously.

One of the radiators that caused the shower trouble.

The solution is obviously to shower first and then turn up the thermostat after showering, which may delay heating by five minutes, but is definitely more comfortable.  (Only the logistics of getting everything wet and wrapping myself in a towel while chilly prevented me from rushing out of the shower to the thermostat to turn it down and then going back to take the rest of my shower.)

So that's one more idiosyncrasy of my apartment sorted out and solved.  I received a message from my landlord a few days ago asking me to please read the gas meter outside my kitchen window and send him the reading, because he thought the company had charged a ridiculously high amount.  (Apparently the gas bills are every two months, so this was the first one since I've moved in.)  I sent him the amount, with some nervousness, afraid that I was about to fulfill national stereotype and be hit with a huge bill, and he wrote back saying that because my meter is not in the back yard with the others the company "estimates" it and they tend to estimate high.  (In this instance by about 355 cubic meters.)  He very kindly told me not to worry about it, and that he would complain to the company and send them the photo of the correct reading that I sent him, and would take care of getting the bill lowered appropriately before passing it on to me.  Since he also told me that the monthly gas bill in wintertime (when the heat is on) is usually about sixty euros (!!!) I plan to continue my campaign to be as economical as possible while still having my creature comforts.  The problem, as my landlord also explained, is that there are a large number of set "fees" for gas, which are rather similar to all the "fees" charged by cable companies in the US, that jack up the price ridiculously.  Unfortunately, unlike cable - which is cheap here - gas is kind of a necessary, because as one of my Madrid friends put it, "aquí, sin calefacción, no se puede vivir."  And then, in recognition of the struggles of his not distant ancestors, added, "o bueno, se puede, pero es desagradable."

As someone who is used to living in a small apartment in a big apartment building, where the monthly maintenance covers all utility costs, and heat and hot water are taken care of at a central level which I never see, I consider all of this tremendously character building.  And I also am glad that all the suitcase space I spent on sweaters and sweatshirts wasn't wasted.