Baby, it’s cold outside -- and inside too

In that old classic song “Baby, it’s cold outside,” Bing Crosby and Doris Day lingered over another drink and gazed longingly into each other’s eyes while the snow piled up outdoors. Bing and Doris preferred the warmth of each other’s company to facing the chill of a winter storm.

Hey, we can relate. About the only thing warm in here is our love for each other. To stay within the Gas Co.’s baseline usage level, we’ve set our thermostat at 60 degrees. Natural gas usage is measured in units called therms. Each therm represents about 100 cubic feet of natural gas. Each household is allotted a baseline number of therms. Up to this baseline, the price is kept relatively low. Above the baseline, the price per unit is higher. Monthly baseline therm levels are about 10 therms during summer and 40 to 50 therms in winter, depending partly on how cold the weather is.

With a thermostat setting of 60, our heater doesn’t usually come on during the daytime. On a sunny winter day, our house naturally maintains a comfortable temperature. If we’re cold, we just put on more clothes. Sometimes we crank up the heat to 65 during the evening, then turn it back down at bedtime. Consequently, our natural gas usage never exceeded the baseline therm level during 2005.

Our house is typical for Huntington Beach in that it uses natural gas for the furnace, water heater, clothes dryer, stove-top and oven. All of these benefits cost us a mere $15 a month in summer and up to $50 in winter. Obviously, home heating is responsible for the lion’s share of our natural gas usage. However, it’s going to cost more this winter because natural gas prices have increased about 50% since last January.

Vic and I really appreciate affordable central heating, having all the hot water we want, and having a washer and dryer in the home. We all take these modern conveniences as necessities now, but they were luxuries only a generation ago.

I’m old enough to remember hanging clothes out on the clothesline in the dead of the Indiana winter because we had no clothes dryer. Sheets and pillowcases would freeze solid before they dried, and my hands would be cold and chapped from hanging up my baby brother’s cloth diapers.

My Grandmother Wilson heated her tiny two-bedroom home with a coal-burning stove in the dining room. When it was really cold, we huddled around the stove, doling out pieces of precious coal one by one. My Grandmother Williams had a coal-burning furnace in her basement with forced air heat, so her entire house was warm. But she had only a three-gallon water heater, with never enough hot water for a bath. She heated water on the stove with a teakettle to add to the bath water. Vic’s grandparents had a summer cabin in Oregon with a wood-burning cookstove. Vic had to chop wood and build a fire before they could cook breakfast or dinner.

Back in our days of poverty during graduate school, Vic and I lived in Connecticut. Homes in that area are heated by heating oil rather than natural gas. Our heating costs were even higher than the rent. Even in the 1970s, it cost us $200 during the coldest months to heat that drafty old house to only 55 degrees. We used a hairdryer to thaw out the hoses in the washing machine in the basement because they froze between washes. We just got used to cold winters.

Right now, I’m working on my laptop in front of a crackling fire in the living room, rather than face my frigid office. It isn’t that burning a fire log makes the room much warmer -- it just feels cozier. In fact, burning a fire log is far from a money-saving device. One fire log costs almost as much as an entire winter day’s worth of natural gas. As soon as I light a fire, the heater comes on as warmed house air goes up the chimney. Once the fire log is burning, we close the glass doors on the fire-screen to prevent more heat from escaping. But that also limits the amount of heat that comes from the fire. The bottom line is that most fireplaces aren’t really good for heating a house. A wood-burning stove does a much better job of heating a room, but it’s far less romantic than an open fire. And that’s really what a fireplace is for in our modern times: romance and ambience, not affordable heat production.

In the 1920s in Huntington Beach, natural gas was a curiosity that was found in local water wells. People would draw a glass of water, put a lid on it to trap the gas that escaped, then drop in a match and watch it burn. In 80 years, natural gas has gone from being an oddity to a necessity. Even our electricity comes from a natural-gas-fired plant, so there’s no escaping its importance to our lives.

Natural gas is a fossil fuel. Like all fossil fuels, the supply is limited and will just get more expensive. We encourage you to do all that you can to conserve this dwindling resource, not because you have to, but because it’s the right thing to do. You’ll even save yourself a few dollars.

* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at vicleipzig@aol.com.

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