Four degrees in the spare bedroom

At 7:10 this morning I started at the front door with the thermometer and a sheet of paper, and finished in the basement at 4:40 p.m. Outside was −6 °C, the only number I did not have to go and find.

The audit, room by room

1. Front hall, 5 °C. The gap under the front door is 5 mm by 900 mm. Ten millimetres inside it the floor read 2 °C, 2 m from the chair I sit in.

2. Living room, 11 °C at 7:10 a.m., 12 °C at 9:00 p.m. The 1 °C between is two adults, one dog, and a door that closes.

3. Kitchen, 6 °C, down from 9 °C on Day 3. The window over the sink is one pane in an aluminium frame; the inside of the glass read 1 °C with 40 mm of ice along the bottom. Ice on the inside of a window is water that left the room.

4. Bathroom, 5 °C. The extractor fan lost power on Day 0 and its flap is a 100 mm hole into the attic, the strongest draught in the house.

5. Spare bedroom, 3 °C. The door has been shut since Day 2. I opened it this morning and the air smelled like the inside of a tent.

6. Basement, 3 °C. The sill plate, where the wood frame sits on the concrete, read 0 °C. The attic hatch above it is 900 mm square with nothing on top, and all ten registers in the house are open.

The house does not lose heat so much as exchange air. Warm air goes up the stairwell and out of the hatch. Cold comes in at the sill and under the door. I have spent nine days heating the bottom of a chimney.

The dog found the gap before I did. For four nights he has slept with his back against the front door and I thought he liked the hallway.

Two things I got wrong in the first week and am still paying for.

I hung a wool blanket across the living room doorway on Day 3 and called the door done. The blanket worked. Under it the gap worked too, and the cold came in along the floor at 2 °C and sat in front of the chair for nine days. The fix is a towel rolled against the door with a foot, and she did it while I was still writing the number down.

The second is worse. I shut the basement door on Day 2 and did not open it again until this morning.

What the pipes are doing, and what is black on the wall

Water has stood in the pipes since the pressure went on Day 2. Nothing has split, because the basement is 3 °C and 3 °C is above zero. That is the whole margin.

There is no floor drain, so no low point to drain to, and the pipes that worry me are on the wrong side of the insulation: the line to the outside tap up the north wall, and the kitchen line inside the exterior wall under the window. If one splits we will not know until the pressure comes back, and then it is a ceiling problem.

Then the bedroom wall. Behind the headboard, a patch 200 mm by 300 mm, black at the edges, and a line of speckles along the window reveal. The wall reads 2 °C and the air reads 4 °C, and two people have been breathing in there with the door shut for twelve nights.

I cleaned it with 300 mL of water and dish detergent, on a damp cloth and not a wet one, because wet drywall is the bigger problem. Health Canada says detergent and water, no bleach. I wore bread bags, because this house has no gloves. Then I pulled the mattress 150 mm off the wall.

Water: 10 L at 7:00 a.m., 7 L at 9:00 p.m. That is 2.6 L drunk, 1.2 L into one pot, 1 L to the dog, 0.2 L over hands, 0.3 L into the cloth. 5.3 L, against 8.6 L on the card.

I did not save 3.3 L by being careful. The cold took the thirst away, and I have called that good management for six days. A litre and a third each is slow dehydration with a headache at 3:00 p.m. I melted 16 L of loose snow for 2.3 L and 37 g of gas, so the day runs 10 − 5.3 + 2.3 = 7.

On the way out I opened the breaker panel to look for the shut-off and found it painted over, behind a shelf. Inside the door is an index card. The man who sold us this house wrote on it in pencil in 2004: twenty-two breakers labelled, the furnace filter date, the company that serviced the boiler. I have looked at it twice in eleven years. His name is on the transfer folder and I had to go and get it.

I said thank you out loud, to a man I met twice, in a 3 °C basement. I have not managed a prayer since Day 7 and I am not sure what that was.

What I would fix first, and what if it never comes back

In order, with what I think things cost:

• Door sweep and brush strip, two doors: $34, the price I looked at in October and walked away from.
• Air sealing the sill and the penetrations: $180 in foam and caulk, or $1,400 to have it done, which is the quote I said no to in 2023.
• A direct-vent gas heater: about $3,000 installed. A generator for the furnace blower was $900 in 2021, when we had never been out for more than six hours.

The first two are $214 and they were in a store in October.

If it is permanent, it is not this month that breaks us. It is the pipes, then the heat. One room at 12 °C is survivable for a month; a winter needs a heat source that does not need a grid. A long outage takes the gas too, and then the furnace is a box with a fan in it.

So I wrote three numbers on the back of the breaker card:

• Kitchen at 1 °C.
• Our water under 4 L.
• Three nights running with the bedroom under 2 °C.

Any one of those and we go. To the house two doors down if she will have us, or to the hall if it has heat. There are three tablets left in the bottle and the last is due on Day 17, so the clock is not mine.

I have not shown her the card. She will ask who decided, and the answer is me, at 10:00 p.m., which is how the bad decisions in this house get made.

Fourteen numbers, and eleven of them I could have measured in 2015. Eleven years of gas bills, and I could not have told anyone which side of this house the kitchen drain runs to. She could. She watched a plumber do it in 2019 and I was at work.

So that is the house. The other one is shorter, and I am not writing it out tonight.

The bell still has not rung. I stopped listening for it around Day 9 and noticed this afternoon, in the hall.

Hall is 7 °C tonight. That is the return on the day: 2 °C in a hallway, from a towel, on day fourteen.

What I should have had on day zero

• A door sweep and brush strip on the two outside doors, $34.
• A nine-dollar thermometer per floor, and paper on the fridge for the number and the date. Week one says "cold", so there is nothing to compare today against.
• Four tubes of caulk and a can of foam: the sill plate, two pipe penetrations, the hole behind the bathroom fan.
• Twelve metres of window film for five single panes.
• One written trigger — the temperature and the litre count at which we leave — agreed with her out loud, before the night it is needed.