For anyone heating a home on too little money · 12 minutes
Almost nobody in a cold home freezes to death. They have a stroke in February, or a chest infection in March, and the cold living room never appears anywhere in the explanation.
Across most of Europe, more people die in winter than in summer, and the deaths are not from exposure — they are heart attacks, strokes, chest infections and falls. A living room at thirteen degrees raises blood pressure, thickens the blood, narrows the airways and stiffens the hands, and the consequences arrive days or weeks later, filed under the illness rather than the temperature. That makes cold housing invisible in a way that heat is not: nobody calls an ambulance because a room is cold. This page is about the numbers that matter, how to spot hypothermia in a house rather than on a mountain, and what a genuinely small amount of money buys if you spend it in the right order.
18 °Cthe floor for bedrooms; 20 °C where you sit still
Weeksthe delay between the cold and the heart attack
€15what a heated throw costs, and it beats a boiler for one person
Heat the person first, then the room you are actually in, then the house. Most people do it in exactly the opposite order, run out of money, and sit in a cold flat with the heating officially on.
What your money buys, in the right order
Say tonight is cold and this is what you have. Pick a budget and the plan below is built for it — free things first, then whatever the money reaches, with what it was not enough for and why. One category is refused at any budget, and that refusal is the most important line in this whole page.
Nothing is saved and nothing is sent anywhere. Prices are rough European retail and the warmth figures are relative, not physics — the point is the order, not the decimal.
Money available this week
Anyone in the house at higher risk?
Why a cold room is a medical problem
Blood pressure rises within minutes of being cold, because the surface vessels clamp down to keep heat in. In someone whose arteries are already narrowed, that is the extra load that tips into a heart attack or a stroke — which is why the excess deaths peak a week or two after a cold snap rather than during it.
Cold thickens the blood and makes it more likely to clot, a change measurable in a few hours of sitting in a cold room.
Cold air narrows the airways. For anyone with asthma or COPD, a cold bedroom is a night of worse breathing and the beginning of the chest infection that follows.
Hands, balance and judgment all get worse before you feel properly cold, which is one reason falls cluster in cold homes — and a fall on a cold floor is also how a slow hypothermia starts.
Cold and damp travel together, and damp brings its own respiratory harm through mould. The two problems share most of their solutions, which is convenient, and most of their causes, which is not.
The people at greatest risk feel it least. The sense of temperature dulls with age and with some illnesses, so the person in the coldest room is frequently the one insisting they are fine.
The numbers worth knowing
A cheap indoor thermometer — five euros, or the one built into a phone-connected plug you may already own — converts a vague argument about whether it is cold into a fact that can be acted on.
20 °C
Comfortable for a room where somebody sits still: reading, watching, minding a baby, recovering from illness.
18 °C
The recommended minimum for occupied rooms and bedrooms, including overnight for anyone older, unwell or very young.
16 °C
Below this, breathing measurably suffers in people with lung disease, and the risk to the chest starts to matter. Tolerable briefly for a healthy adult who is moving about; not somewhere to sit all evening.
12 °C
Below this, blood pressure and clotting changes become significant and the cardiovascular risk is real. A room this cold with a vulnerable person in it is a problem to solve this week, not this spring.
Under 5 °C
Pipes and health both fail here. If a home is this cold indoors, that is an emergency for the person in it, and a reason to get them somewhere warm and to ring for help.
Humidity matters almost as much. Aim to keep indoor relative humidity roughly between forty and sixty per cent. Above that, condensation and mould follow — and damp air also feels colder, which means you spend money heating a room that still feels cold. A cheap hygrometer usually comes built into the same five-euro thermometer.
Hypothermia indoors, which looks nothing like the films
Indoor hypothermia is slow, usually happens to somebody who has been sitting or lying still for hours, and the person very often says they are fine. It kills people in armchairs and on bathroom floors, not on mountains.
Early: shivering, cold hands and feet, pale skin, clumsiness, complaining of cold. This stage is a warning, and it is easy to fix.
The dangerous change is when the shivering stops while the person is still cold. Shivering is the body's own heating; when it switches off, the core temperature is falling and the person is getting worse, not better.
Then behaviour, not temperature, tells you: confusion, slurred or slow speech, apathy, unusual sleepiness, mumbling, poor judgment. Somebody who has quietly stopped making sense in a cold house is a medical emergency, however calm they look.
Paradoxical undressing is real: people with moderate hypothermia sometimes take clothes off because they feel a rush of warmth. If you find somebody undressed in a cold room, do not assume they wanted to be.
In babies, cold looks like quiet. A cold baby may not shiver much: they go still, feed poorly, and their skin can look pink and healthy while their hands, feet and back are cold. Any floppy, cold or unusually quiet baby needs urgent medical assessment.
Alcohol, sleeping tablets and some medicines make it far worse, because they widen the vessels, blunt the shivering, and remove the judgment that would otherwise get somebody to a blanket.
Rewarm like this
Get them out of the cold and out of anything wet, gently
Wrap the whole person, head included, in dry blankets or a duvet; insulate them from the floor
Warm sweet drinks if they are fully awake and can swallow
Warmth to the trunk — a hot water bottle wrapped in a towel on the chest or belly, not against bare skin
Handle them horizontally and slowly, and let them rest: standing a cold person up can drop their blood pressure sharply
Ring for medical help if they are confused, drowsy, not shivering, or not improving
Never
A hot bath or shower, which pulls blood to the skin and can stop the heart
Vigorous rubbing of hands and feet, for the same reason
Alcohol, which feels warming and loses heat faster
Direct high heat on skin — a fire, an unwrapped bottle, a hairdryer — on numb skin that cannot feel a burn
Assuming that "they say they are fine" is information, once thinking is affected
Leaving them alone to warm up while you get on with something else
Call the emergency number if a cold person is confused or hard to rouse, has stopped shivering while still cold, is breathing slowly or shallowly, or collapses. If they are unresponsive and not breathing normally, start chest compressions — and keep going, because resuscitation in deep hypothermia works far more often than people expect. In an emergency, 112.
Who the cold reaches first
Older people, who feel cold later, move less, produce less heat, and are far likelier to have the heart and lung disease that cold pushes over the edge.
Babies and small children, who lose heat fast relative to their size and cannot do anything about a cold room except be quiet about it.
Anyone with heart disease, high blood pressure, asthma or COPD, for whom the cold is not discomfort but an extra load on the exact system that is already struggling.
People with reduced mobility, who sit still for hours, and people who have fallen and cannot get up — the commonest route to serious indoor hypothermia there is.
Underactive thyroid, diabetes, dementia, Parkinson's disease and severe undernutrition all reduce the body's ability to make or hold heat, or the person's ability to notice.
Anyone on medicines that blunt the response to cold: sedatives and sleeping tablets, some antipsychotics, beta blockers and drugs that widen the blood vessels all reduce shivering, awareness or heat retention. This is worth naming at a medication review rather than guessing about — and it is one more reason the person in the cold room may not feel it.
Anyone who has not had this winter's vaccinations. Flu, covid and pneumococcal vaccination are free for exactly the groups the cold hurts most, and the illnesses they prevent are the ones a cold home turns into an admission. It is the cheapest winter measure on this page because somebody else is paying for it.
Anyone rationing energy. Prepayment meters, arrears and the fear of the next bill produce self-disconnection, which is invisible to everybody except the person sitting in a coat indoors.
Damp, mould and the argument about who caused it
Mould is not a cosmetic problem: it worsens asthma, causes wheeze and chest infections, and is worst for the same children and older people the cold is worst for. Almost all household mould is a moisture-and-temperature problem, not a cleaning problem.
Warm air holds moisture; cold surfaces release it. That is why mould grows on the cold external wall behind the wardrobe and in the corners of an unheated bedroom, and why the answer involves heat and ventilation rather than bleach alone.
Ventilate briefly and hard rather than continuously: windows wide open for five to ten minutes, especially after showers and cooking, then closed. That dumps the moist air without cooling the walls, which is the cheap version of ventilation.
Cover pans, use the extractor, and do not dry washing on radiators in a closed room — a single load of wet laundry puts a couple of litres of water into the air.
Leave a gap behind furniture on outside walls and keep those rooms slightly heated rather than closed and cold, which is the pattern that grows the black spots in the corners.
Clean small patches with an appropriate mould product and repair the cause; get advice rather than dry-brushing or sanding large areas, which spreads spores into the air you are breathing.
If you rent, damp and mould are usually the landlord's responsibility where the cause is the building — leaks, failed roofs, cold bridging, no extractor fan, single glazing. Report it in writing with photographs and dates, keep the replies, and ask for a written response. "You are drying clothes indoors" is not an answer when there is nowhere else to dry them.
Heat the person, then the room
The instinct is to heat the whole house to a comfortable number, discover it is unaffordable, and then heat nothing. The cheaper and warmer strategy is the reverse: put the heat where the person is.
The body first. Thin layers, especially wool or fleece next to the skin, a hat indoors (a genuinely large share of heat leaves the head), and something insulating between you and the chair or floor. Cold feet are worth two jumpers — slippers with soles beat socks.
Then a heated object. A hot water bottle, a heated throw or an electric blanket costs a few cents an hour, warms a person directly, and does not care how big the room is. For one or two people sitting still, this is where the value is.
Then one room. Pick the room you actually live in, close its door, draught-proof it, curtain the windows at dusk, and heat that room. Keep the rest of the house above twelve degrees so pipes and walls stay out of trouble, and stop trying to heat rooms nobody sits in.
Eat and drink hot things, on a schedule. A hot meal and hot drinks through the day genuinely help a body hold its temperature, and skipping meals to pay the meter removes the fuel the body heats itself with. One hot meal, a flask of tea made once, and a hot drink before bed cost very little and do more than an extra hour of heating.
Then the envelope. Draught strips on doors and letterboxes, a filled gap under a door, thermal curtain lining, a reflective panel behind a radiator on an external wall, and radiator valves turned down where nobody sits. These are the cheapest permanent degrees available.
Then the system. Bleed radiators, check the boiler flow temperature is not set higher than the system needs, use the timer so the heat lands when people are actually in the room, and get the annual service — which is also the carbon monoxide check.
Then the building, which is where grants live: loft insulation, cavity walls, better glazing. Slow, worth doing, and not tonight's problem.
The one thing that must never be part of any plan: heating a room with something that was not designed and vented for it. No hobs or ovens as heaters, no barbecues, no patio heaters, no camping stoves, no generators, and no unflued paraffin or bottled-gas heater in a closed bedroom. These produce carbon monoxide, which has no smell and kills people while they sleep — and they are exactly what people reach for on the coldest night of the year. If you use any flame or fuel indoors, you need a certified carbon monoxide alarm where you sleep.
Electric blankets and heated throws: buy from a shop rather than a marketplace listing, check the age of any inherited one, replace anything scorched, frayed or over a decade old, and follow the label about whether it may be left on overnight. An old electric blanket is a fire risk and is also the cheapest warmth in the house — both facts are true, so buy a new one rather than avoiding the category.
The money side, which is mostly unclaimed
Never self-disconnect quietly. Sitting in the cold to avoid a bill is the most dangerous economy in this whole subject, and it is invisible to everybody who could help. Ring the supplier and say the words: financial difficulty.
Suppliers have more than one route: payment plans, hardship funds, arrears write-offs in some cases, and a register for customers whose health depends on power — medical equipment, refrigerated medicines, mobility. Nobody is offered any of it without asking.
Check the benefits and discounts you already qualify for. Cold-weather payments, energy allowances, social tariffs, insulation grants and municipal emergency funds all go unclaimed at scale, and a free advice service will run the check faster than you can.
Prepayment meters are the expensive way to be poor. If you are on one and struggling, ask about moving to a credit meter, about emergency credit, and about the protections that apply to households with children or health conditions.
Energy debt is a priority debt, because disconnection or forced prepayment harms health directly — deal with it before unsecured credit, and get free debt advice rather than a commercial offer.
Warm public spaces exist and are not charity in any embarrassing sense. Libraries, community centres, churches, day centres and municipal warm rooms are open, free and heated, and a few hours a day in one is both warmth and company — which is the other thing a cold winter takes away. Ask the library or the municipality what is open and when.
Ask for a smart meter reading you can see, or a cheap plug-in monitor: knowing which appliance costs what turns rationing from guesswork into decisions. Heating water and heating rooms are almost always the big two.
Checking on somebody
The person most at risk is usually not going to ring anybody. Two minutes of noticing, once a week during a cold spell, is the intervention.
At the door: “I brought you these, and it is freezing out — is your heating coping?
Do you mind if I put my hand on the radiator? Which rooms are you actually using?
Are you sleeping warm enough? Have you got a hot water bottle that still holds?
Is there anything you have stopped putting the heating on for?
If it goes off in the night, will you ring me? Any hour is fine.”
Look at the room, not the person's reassurance: a coat worn indoors, one heated room, an unheated bedroom, a hallway you can see your breath in, condensation or mould in the corners.
Feel the radiators and look at the thermostat. A thermostat set to twenty-five in a cold room means the heating is not working; a thermostat set to twelve means somebody is frightened of the bill.
Ask what they have stopped doing. Not heating the bedroom, not using hot water, going to bed at seven to keep warm, skipping meals for the meter — each answer names a specific thing you can help with.
Bring warmth rather than advice: a heated throw, a thermal curtain, draught strips fitted while you are there, a hot water bottle that is not perished, a hat. Fitting it yourself is the difference between a good idea and a warm room.
If they are confused, drowsy or not shivering in a cold house, that is not a conversation to continue — get help now, and stay with them.
Agree a check-in pattern for cold weeks — a daily message, curtains open by ten, a neighbour with a key. The people who die of the cold indoors are almost always people nobody looked at for a few days.
The drill: 16 decisions
Sixteen ordinary moments — a freezing bedroom, an old electric blanket, a neighbour in a coat indoors, a meter running out at ten at night. Most have an instinctive answer that costs money, heat or somebody's life. Pick your move; every answer explains why.
The card
Print it for the fridge, or for the person you check on.
A COLD HOME — THE NUMBERS AND THE ORDER
TEMPERATURES
20 °C where you sit still · 18 °C bedrooms and occupied rooms