The house taken by the cold

In my diary I often use the expression sunny and blue to describe the daytime weather in wintertime Spain. Hardly a cloud in the blue, blue sky and a temperature anywhere from the low teens to the low twenties. This year it's been particularly warm. But warm is relative. In the sun, in a pavement bar, in our garden, it's warm, but in the same spot, half an hour later, in the shade it's chilly. Our incoming water pipe passes along a North facing wall and often, during the winter, it would freeze up and leave us waterless till around noon when the day warmed up. Nowadays it has layers and layers of lagging and duct tape and we no longer need to venture out either smelly and tealess.

Our kitchen door opens onto a patio. l leave it open as I'm cooking lunch and I'm fine, temperature wise; not so good chef-wise. Our living room, on the other side of the kitchen though is distinctly chilly and, before Maggie comes home from a hard morning at the office, I put on some heating in there. It's not freezing cold but it is the sort of temperature where, even with a thick pully, the heat slowly seeps out and you suddenly realise that your hands and your nose are numbed by cold.

We know lots of people who are quite well off and have all sorts of ways of keeping their Spanish homes warm; they have modern and innovative heating solutions. We also know of people who tough it out in outdoor clothing inside or who live in igloo type blankets surrounded by the blasted wasteland of their sitting room. We're pretty traditional though and we pay to heat the house without ever having got around to the best way of keeping the house warm, which is to insulate it properly. We have big, thick walls and badly fitting windows and doors. Our living room has a very high ceiling so the air we've paid to warm quickly escapes through the layers of concrete and tiles above - there is no foam or fibreglass to impede its dash to the great outdoors. We'd be that house in the, UK, advert without snow on the roof because it isn't properly insulated. Mind you so would be all the other houses in the area. The winds that whistle under the exterior doors to our living room and kitchen will blow out a candle. When we heat the living room and then open a door into the adjoining bedroom or extension we get a good anabatic (or is it katabatic) wind because of the temperature gradient.

I'm in a back bedroom at the moment, it's nearly 6pm and it's 17ºC. Not that cold but I have a butane gas heater burbling along behind me with one of it's three elements alight. We have similar gas heaters in the living room and kitchen. They are dead useful for providing radiant heat very quickly. Sit close to one in a frozen room and it's like standing by the village bonfire. It may be cold around you but you're immediate space is nice and cosy. They produce a lot of water though and you have to be careful not to die asphyxiated.

In the living room we also have a hot and cold aircon unit. I turn that, and the gas heater, on about half an hour before Maggie gets home for lunch, and the 3pm news, so that the room feels relatively welcoming. When we settle down for the evening we turn on the pellet burner. This was Maggie's idea. She didn't think that the log burner which we had before (and which had replaced the original wood burning fireplace), produced enough heat. She didn't like the filth it produced either. It wasn't exactly cheap to run but, to her credit, she worried most about the serious injuries it caused me from time to time when my log chopping kit of goggles, to avoid early onset blindness, and impact absorbing clothing failed to protect me from the flying splinters. I always worry for, the shirtless, Charlie Bronson as he chops wood in the Magnificent Seven. So the log burner went and a pellet burner replaced it. The pellets are, I think, produced from wood and other biomass, and they are the fuel fed into a small crucible to burn in a controlled environment. It produces lots of heat, ours is rated at about 11kw. It also produces a decibel level similar to the noise the old class 55 Deltics made passing through York station at speed. It can turn the living room into an oven but, although it's supposed to have a few burn speeds it's basically binary - on or off. We control the temperature by opening the doors to the unheated spaces!

Other than that there are a couple of, strategically placed, fan heaters or fan and convector heaters which we use to heat small spaces for short periods. Every now and then I think back to the comfort we enjoyed in the carpeted, curtained, insulated and centrally heated house we last lived in in the UK.