December Cold in Minnesota

In article ,
Andrew Price wrote:

On Sat, 20 Dec 2008 17:38:15 -0600, Tim McNamara
wrote:

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At 4:15 when I left the workshop to go
home, the wind had picked up and the temperatures felt much colder-
it's dropped 13 degrees F since 1:00PM to 8F now, and will be
dropping to 2F tonight and -14F tomorrow night. Sigh. I'm not a
real Minnesotan and I don't enjoy this stuff.

That I can well sympathise with - living in Western Europe, to me,
those temperatures look really mean. How do you cope with it indoors
- double/triple glazing on windows and lots of insulation? I imagine
that heating costs must represent a considerable part of the
household budget, too.

I live in a 100 year old house which doesn't have double glazing but has
the usual double-hung inner sashes and storm windows. If you keep the
weather seals in good shape, the cold air intrusion is minimal and the
heat loss moderate. The house is well insulated and thus summer I had
all the old badly damaged siding replaced with Hardieboard, so I will be
interested to see if the heating bills are lower. The house is
certainly much quieter with the new siding.

In the peak (trough?) of winter, the heat bill has been about $200-300 a
month depending on energy costs; the local energy monopoly has a program
to spread those costs out year 'round- part of the year we are paying in
advance of winter and part of the year we are paying off the balance.
It ends up being about $125 a month year 'round for natural gas and
electricity combined. We pay a little extra to support development of
wind power in Minnesota.