That’s a pointless title. The truth is that 5.5 people claim they didn’t heat sufficiently. Whether it was objectively sufficient is a completely different question and going by the actual numbers for usage, households Germans barely reduced their heating. Almost all savings were done by the industry. The the average person in Germany still heats their living room above 20°C.
If you’re healthy then going with 17°C indoors isn’t actually a problem (I tested that myself last year). Having to wear a second sweater or using a blanket isn’t something you should get to complain about when the alternative literally kills people.
It’s not like I could before. It’s just going to be more expensive again, but I have already kept my heating pretty low.
And meanwhile my neighbour just keeps his windows open in winter since the costs are included in the rent. Fuck him.
Surely it is your landlord that doesn’t include the heating in the cost of rent who should get fucked, not your neighbour, a fellow renter who for whatever reason just managed to get a better deal than you did? Perhaps they are abusing it slightly, perhaps they have good reason, like an illness, that justifies them opening their window? Either way, only one of them has any impact on you, so why are you angry on the one that has none?
I judge people so much for being that wasteful, it makes them look stupid and selfish.
This was 2022, but I expect this year to be the same or worse.
As someone who rents an appartment, I do not have a sense for heating and what I can afford. I simply get the bills one year later
I take “Lacks a personal budget tool” for 100.
Seriously, get an app of your choice to keep track of your finances. It will pay for itself within days.
I’m not sure how a personal budget app can help you keep track of a Heizkostenverteiler/heating cost allocator. There’s many unknowns during the operation time and even the landlord is given a year to crunch the numbers before they bill the tenants.
What is progress is that people on district heating now get their kWh consumption readings every few months.
A budget app won’t keep track of the energy used on heating, of course. But it will sure help getting a broader overview of what the budget allows, by making obvious what the budget actually is.
To me it sounded like that was a basic problem here: Having no idea what the budget actually is. Looks like a lot of people didn’t get that drift ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .
One year, wow. And I thought having the district heating bills lag by 2-3 months due to bureaucracy was bad. 😆 Although in a way I guess it’s more intuitive, if you pay for January of previous year in January. Here we pay for January in March and it’s a bit weird to get a large heating bill when it’s getting warm out.
In Germany you pay “in advance” and then at the end of the year they calculate how much you actually used and give you a bill stating how much you still owe or how much they’ll have to refund.
Sorry but if the house is properly heated - there are no Germans living there.
You need to put on the heater in many homes because otherwise you will get mold. It depends on the house, of course. Doesn’t matter how much you cross ventilate. :(
I feel offended that you seem to be right, because I’m a German and I rarely heat at all.
Yeah I was going to ask, what is proper indoor temperature for Germany anyway, like 18°C?
No… the minimum requred temperature for everyone I know complaining about those “the evil government wants to ban heating!”-fairy tales wide spread in Germany is 23°-25°C at least or they will instantly start freezing to their deaths somehow.
Gotta wear that tshirt
There is no official proper indoor temperature, but the courts settled at > 20 °C in the day and > 18 °C in the night as “normal”. If it’s not possible to achieve this temperature, the tenant has the right to withhold part of the rent as long as the heating is not fixed. But tenants are allowed to have their appartment as cold as they like as long as they don’t grow mold.
If you have old people as neighbours above and below you’ll sit at 23°C without ever turning the radiator on in the deepest winter.
cries in neighbors having their gas sealed off
Old people are more likely to have arthritis or joint pain.
Also more likely to spend more time at home.
Looks like they’re dumb enough do be employed. I Germany, the unemployed don’t need to foot their heating bill. The government covers it.
Unfortunately, the people were neither given nor asked for the “sufficient” temperature. While I don’t appeciate that climate measures are forced on the poor only, there’s many people that waste a lot of energy on heating in the winter. I don’t think 22°C+ should be the norm. If you put on some warm clothes, 18°C are absolutely fine. Personally, I like colder temps indoor and I go for 16°C in the winter as long as there’s no mold issues.
I actually like colder temperatures, but I’ve noticed that due to the wall structure (or something) the outer walls ‘radiate’ a lot of coldness right onto my bed which is next to said wall. (Of course cold does not radiate, the opposite is true). To keep that within bounds, I’ve found it helpful to keep an awfully high room temp, around 24c.
That and there being serious building structure issues that cause a ton of mold in winter when not heating
there is studies that concluded an increased risk of getting colds, when the indoor temperature is consistently below 20 °C
There are indeed studies but they place the low cutoff at 18°C not at 20°.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK535294/
For countries with temperate or colder climates, 18 °C has been proposed as a safe and well-balanced indoor temperature to protect the health of general populations during cold seasons.
There is studies that 16-20C is the optimal temperature for sleeping
I think there are also different mentalities. Just last winter, I had a similar discussion, where someone explained to me that the room heating is meant to fully offset the temperature, so he can walk summer and winter in shorts, t-shirt and barefoot. So it’s 23°C in winter.
While I’m used to wearing jogging pants and socks indoor during winter, so 18°C is fine for me.
Then again, you also have to adjust for personal preferences, different sex, different heating infrastructure etc. But 23°C to go shorts and barefoot in winter was an extreme reveal to me, that people do something like this as well.
You do understand that this is pretty much the same discussion that was made regarding showers in Germany? When we’ll paid politicians gave advice about personal hygiene with a damp cloth instead of taking regular showers?
I wish I could do that. Unfortunately my rented flat requires 23°C of heating to prevent mold thanks to bad windows that cannot be fixed due to the house community not wanting to pay for replacing them. And yes I’m practicing proper venting, supported with several devices for timing. I’m so glad I’ll be moving out soon.
For just sitting around 18 or 16°C is way too cold.
Even in warm clothing.
I’m perfectly fine sitting at my desk all day with 18°C in shorts and hoodie.
Found the Canadian
Sorry
Proving my point, eh? ;)
Nah, it’s fine.
It’s almost as if different people who are used to potentially drastically different climates may have a different amount of tolerance for the cold.
Yes, but in the absence of other factors, “cold tolerance” is something that can change by habituation.
If you put on some warm clothes, 18°C are absolutely fine.
Not if you’re very young, very old, or have any one of an endless list of health conditions
Which is exactly what Putin aims to achieve, in an effort to weaken Western resolve. And be real: it is no coincidence that the politicians opposed to helping people heat their homes affordably are conservatives with questionable views on russia.
The Putin puppets (AFD, FN, Fidez,…):
- Reject push for renewable energy (muh coal, muh diesel)
- “Subsidies are fascist”
- “Wah, wah, can’t afford my environment destroying car/heater anymore”
- “Thanks Obama”
Please do not share links from this rightwing outlet - isn’t someone else reporting on this subject?
Okay, OP already changed the link, cause I thought “since when is destatis rightwing?”
I’m not familiar with German newspapers, do you have an article from another newspaper I could replace the link with?
The FAZ is still rather conservative, but much better than the “Welt”:
Or you could link to DeStatis, the website of the Federal Statistical Office:
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/Zahl-der-Woche/2023/PD23_48_p002.html
Whatever you like best! Thank you for considering to change the link.
Updated to Destatis!
On kbin the article is still linked to „Welt“ - does it work on Lemmy?
yes, probably a federation issue
Edit: OP shared a link to „Welt“
Welt has a right wing bias, but it’s fairly reliable with facts. So on direct reports on surveys you can use them as source (just like you can use TAZ for example, just with a left-wing bias).
Nah- Springer (Welt, Bild) is different.
Show me the TAZ hate campaigns
I’m not talking about “Bild” here. They’re obviously not reliable. Welt however isn’t nearly as polemic. I disagree with a lot they write, but I don’t think they do “hate campaigns” either.
Same publisher, same mindset, softer language.
I mean if course they tone it down for the Intellectuals because this type of person is usually more complex and stuff, but they still spread the same narrative
Same publisher, same mindset, softer language.
Yeah, they’re conservative. But that doesn’t make them liars. I’m not saying “Welt” is great if you want a balanced viewpoint and they most certainly pick and chose in what they mention, but you can find that on the other side of the political spectrum as well. It’s Bild that doesn’t really have a counterpart.
Welt is the Bild for those that think or want to appear as intellectual.
Thanks Merkel for keeping us dependent on russian gas.
And thanks all the peoplethat voted against efforts to move to renewables, continue to block themand opposed a law that would transition us away from fossil heating.
Also the sale of Oil and Gas heating skyrocketed this year, because of panics that it might be banned soon to install new ones under the new law. The law specified something like 2027, but the German idiot never lets facts get in the way of his Angst and panic pushed by right wing media and politics.
The issue is that the progressive side warned that this will happen and it will get worse as the prices of fossils have to increase. But the conservative majority in Germany wants to get fucked, as long as they can continue fucking the planet, because that is what they always did and identify with.
Danke Merkel, danke für die schöne zeit…
Its true of course that this was merkels fault, but lets be honest, its not like the ampel-coalition would have done anything against it, were it not for the war in ukraine
That’s not true. The greens have always pushed for more renewables. The Ukraine war didn’t change that, if anything it forced the ampel to build LNG terminals and subsidize gas.
Thanks Merkel for keeping us dependent on russian gas.
And let’s thank the SPD for making us depend on russian gas in the first place.
diE gRüNeN wOlLeN uNs UnSeRe aUtOs wEgNehMeN!!!
This artificial panic is for once not about cars, it’s about heating. Too many germans think and or have been conditioned to think that the Greens and other environmentalists want them to just shut off their heating and freeze. The network of gas industry lobbyists is strong in germany and successfully installed a “clean-gas”-campaign in the former government and now convinces even a Green industrial minister to install new and very oversized LNG terminals, in part because of the Green-cold scare.
Thanks Merkel
Let’s not forget the excellent work of Peter Altmaier in that regard:
“could not”… it’s past tense, in 2022. (also in past tense in the article linked.) I expect that as the first panic around energy vs. ru-ua war settled at the end of 2022 / beg. 2023, prices went back to a normal, although probably not pre-war, levels. (at least that’s what happened in the netherlands.)
Thanks, edited the title!
