For months now, I’ve been participating in covert operations, mostly when it’s dark. Once the lights are turned off, I sneak into the house, without my husband seeing me, turning down the knobs on the radiators in the living room, the TV room, the spare room and the hallway. I don’t touch the one in my husband’s office, for tactical reasons.

Every once in a while, he passes a heater, notices that it’s set to the snowflake symbol, and turns it back on. As soon as possible, I lower it.

When he’s away, I also tweak the thermostat, which he eventually winds up, triumphantly assuming he’s won this latest skirmish, not realizing that all my sneaking around the house with the swinging radiator dials is making the thermostat largely useless, except in his office. That’s why I don’t touch it.

Sarah Frieze (yes, really) sneaks around the house, unseen by her husband, Anthony, turning down the radiator dials in every room except hers – for tactical reasons

Clever? Not always. I once got the wrong dial in the spare and stuck it at the highest setting, which broke the mechanism. It cost me a plumber’s visit of £80. Which I managed to keep secret from my husband.

It’s mid-November and already British households are engaged in a bitter battle over heating. A new survey reveals that one in four people regularly argue with their partner about the temperature, while 18% feel frustrated by family members who tinker with the temperature. If they find out, of course.

My husband and I are practical and detail-oriented people. We agree on the level of lighting we need as the nights draw in, what items are on our weekly shopping list, and the right day in December to put up Christmas decorations. But for heating, we are fighting.

A survey found that one in four couples regularly argue about the temperature in the house, while 18% are frustrated by family members who tinker with the temperature (posed by models).

My daughter and I call these the Cold Wars, and they rage in our house along strict, if unconventional, gender lines.

Research published in 2019 showed that men and women generally want different things when it comes to indoor room temperature. Overall, Professor Nicole Sintov of Ohio State University found that women tend to fall toward the warmer end of the indicator, compared to men’s often cooler preferences.

It’s also a difference that has long been the subject of office wars.

In 2015, an article titled “Excessive office cooling reveals gender inequality in thermal comfort” showed that thermostats were set in office buildings according to a 1960s formula based on a person’s heat needs. 40 year old man weighing 11 kg.

Apparently, men perform better at cooler temperatures, while women perform better at mental tasks when it’s warmer, meaning the corporate thermostat has traditionally favored a perfect masculine work environment over women.

“We’re seeing this now in family conflicts over temperature, where it’s possible that women are losing the battle over the thermostat,” says Professor Sintov. “This alludes to a sexist status quo in heat settings that leads to a home thermal environment that does not meet women’s preferences.”

Well, some women. Maybe Professor Sintov would like to come and study us, because at home it’s exactly the opposite. I am much more resistant to the cold than my husband Anthony. And while our 21-year-old son wanders around barefoot and in a T-shirt, shivering like a whippet and complaining about the cold, my daughter – a 23-year-old climate change warrior and charity shop enthusiast – is dressed in second-hand tweeds and natural fiber sweaters, and wraps herself in a duvet if all else fails. If given half a chance, she too will turn the dial down.

My husband, on the other hand, is a tropical flower. Where I like the quick and economical 17°C thermostat is turning it up to 24°C to curdle milk (according to this week’s poll, the “ideal” temperature for your home is 19.5°C ).

I dread the day when he signs us up for one of the app-controlled heating systems and can control the thermostat remotely, which happens to my shivering friend Deborah. “I turn it up because I’m the one freezing at home and he monitors it through the app from work and turns it down. It’s a yo-yo battle!’

To be honest, my husband has two credible defenses: he was born in Australia and he pays the heating bills. Not that I don’t pay anything. We split our expenses fairly evenly, but the things I pay for – supermarkets, TV subscriptions and water bills – don’t cause similar drama.

I’m a loving enough wife to not want direct conflict, so I fight back with guerrilla warfare. We live in a narrow terraced house. My husband insists that the heaters be on in all the downstairs rooms of the house because they warm up the upper floors. A particular frontline is the large radiator in our hall, which rejects heat into the street every time the front door is opened.

“The hot air is rising in the stairwell,” Anthony says firmly.

A bone of contention between Susannah and Anthony is the hallway radiator, which releases heat into the street every time the front door is opened.

“Thermal convection replaces the colder air from the street with the warm air from our lobby,” I reply.

Ah, those winter nights of jokes and hearty debates.

Hostilities were thawed by buying him a thick crimson and white wool blanket to “wear” indoors instead of relying on the heat levels of a greenhouse. At first he wasn’t impressed, but when I told him how regal it was and how much it suited him, he relented.

The news that we could try to claim household expenses because we worked from home pleased him. “My employer would pay for us to be warm enough at the office,” he sang, “so he could pay for us to be warm enough at home!”

But I wasn’t eligible because I’m self-employed, and its relief (granted by the Income Tax Earnings and Pensions Act 2003) was capped at £244 a year with a tonne of paperwork which , even in his opinion, was not worth it.

Susannah has cold feet, but her husband objects to her friendly suggestion to practice thermal convection under the sheets.

It took a family meeting and a poker-based negotiation – “I’ll see your 17 degrees and raise it to 19 degrees” – for us to reach a compromise, helped by the fact that we now have low-energy products. cost. underfloor heating in the kitchen with a separate thermostat set to 18.2c by our builders which none of us know how to change yet.

So now I work in a state of constant bliss around the kitchen table in our basement, and His Lordship reigns over his thermostat set at 22° in solitary splendor on the main floor upstairs.

Our only place of true peace is the bedroom, which neither of us likes to heat, preferring cold noses and a thick duvet.

But there is also Cold Feet Wars. For a warm-blooded person, I have the cold feet of a turtle. For some reason, my husband objects to my friendly suggestion to practice thermal convection under the sheets. “No, I don’t want your cold feet getting stuck in my warm calves,” he grunts.

For now, I’ll keep resistance low – and, with gas prices rising, I hope to exploit my advantage by Christmas.

ANTHONY WROTES:

There were times early in the thermostat wars when I let myself be convinced by my wife’s arguments that turning down the heat was both good for us and our wallets.

The problem was, we both looked like Soviet-era gulag prisoners, wrapped in layer upon layer, topped with hoods and scarves. Not only have I struggled to bend my arm enough to type, but opening the door for the countless deliveries we receive for a house full of people working from home has become awkward.

At the start of the thermostat war with Susannah, Anthony says they looked like Soviet-era gulag prisoners, wrapped in layer upon layer, topped with hoods and scarves.

Delivery driver, outside, scantily clad in fleece and designer pants, amazed by Siberian parcel recipient, inside, holding out blue-tipped hands in fingerless gloves.

“Are you okay, buddy?” » they would ask. “The boiler is flashing? »

She’s right that things got better when she bought me my ermine-trimmed bathrobe. It wraps itself around my icy loins and makes me feel like an eccentric aristocrat in his unheatable Scottish castle. And it can easily be tossed aside when the doorbell rings for the 100th time in a day.

What Susannah hasn’t addressed – as she rails against the modern tendency to “blame” everything on the menopause – is that her natural body temperature is rather higher than it was. Hot flashes mean we are not functioning on an equal footing.

Not that I would ever be stupid enough to bring that into the thermostat wars. If I know anything about menopause, it’s that you choose your battles carefully.