Heat is a bill, not a constraint

What the record holds

The log is not an energy diary and the household did not supply bills, so this page has fewer numbers than the rest of the site. A separate perspective on homes, workplaces, or remote work is available from Leesman.

What it has is the behaviour, which was recorded because it affected room use:

• The heating ran from about seven to about ten on weekdays during the fortnight, which the household described as unchanged from before.
• Bedroom two has a radiator that was on throughout the working day.
• The living room was described as cold in the morning and is one of the stated reasons work starts in the kitchen.
• On four days the kitchen was chosen over the living room explicitly for warmth.

So heat did shape where activities went — four logged instances — but through comfort rather than possibility.

The transfer

Before this arrangement, two people spent roughly nine hours a day each in a building heated by somebody else. Now that heat is bought by the household.

That is a straightforward transfer of an operating cost from an employer to an employee, it is not small, and nothing in this record or in most discussions of the subject treats it as one.

An office arrangement includes heating, lighting, a chair, a desk, a toilet and somewhere to make tea. A home arrangement includes none of them and the difference is paid by the household.

Why it is not on the constraints list

Because it is reversible and the others are not.

A household that could afford to heat the whole flat all day would remove the four warmth-driven room choices in this record and would remove none of the twenty-two acoustic collisions, none of the floor area problem, and nothing about daylight.

Money changes heat. It does not change where the walls are.

That is the distinction this part of the site is built on, and heat falls on the other side of it.

What the household did about it

Nothing structural. Two behavioural things, both recorded.

Working where it is already warm. Which is the kitchen, for the reason that it contains appliances, and which contributes to the kitchen's six uses.

Heating one room. Bedroom two's radiator stayed on through the working day while the rest of the flat did not. This is the sensible response and it also means the person in the quiet room is in the one comfortable room, which is a small addition to an already uneven distribution.

The number that is missing

This record cannot say what the arrangement costs in energy, and it would be the single most useful number on the site if it could.

What would be needed is a comparison between the household's consumption in this fortnight and in an equivalent fortnight when both people were in offices. The data exists in principle — meter readings — and was not collected, because the log was designed around rooms and uses and nobody thought of it until afterwards.

That is a straightforward omission and it is recorded here rather than quietly left out, because a reader asking "what does this cost?" is asking a reasonable question that the record does not answer.

What the four warmth-driven choices were

All four are the same shape and all four are early morning.

In each, somebody intending to work in the living room went to the kitchen instead, because the living room was cold and the kitchen was not. Three of the four are in the first week, before the household had settled into starting in the kitchen as a matter of course.

The fourth is interesting because it ran the other way: somebody moved out of the kitchen to the living room at eleven, having put the heating on at ten, which is the only entry in the record where a household decision about heating changed which room an activity went to.

Four out of a hundred and thirty-five logged events is a small influence, and it is a real one, and it is entirely absent from the collision count because none of the four displaced anything.

The question a reader will have

What does it cost?

The record cannot say. Meter readings were not collected, the household did not supply bills, and the comparison that would be needed — this fortnight against an equivalent fortnight with both people in offices — does not exist because the arrangement predates the log by six months.

That is the largest single omission in this record and it is the easiest to fix in a repeat. Two meter readings, fourteen days apart, in each of two arrangements.

It is set out here rather than buried because the transfer of heating cost from employer to household is the most widely discussed aspect of working from home, and this site has fourteen days of detailed room data and nothing whatever to say about it.