I was once desperately poor. Too poor to turn on the heat. But I did have access to friendly cats, so I've been through this experiment in real life.
One cat stuffed under the blankets at night is a significant improvement. But as you add more and more cats, the improvement becomes only incremental.
I eventually learned that two cats was really the best one could hope for. Best positioning is between the legs, and with the blankets pulled up over my head with a little crack for breathing. After that, adding more cats doesn't help much.
If I was still cold after two cats, I had to break down and turn on the heat.
I can confirm this. Years back I had those (now deceased) two cats who liked to get under the blankets while we were sleeping, but apparently they liked me more than my girlfriend, so until they decided to leave I had those furry warmers lying down along my legs, one here and one there. A couple more cats along my arms and I could easily turn off the heater. House is small though, so max 2 cats at a time to avoid hygiene related issues.
These days I have two different cats; one loves sleeping between my torso and the right arm keeping his head on my shoulder, pretty much like a baby, and the other one from time to time climbs on my belly to sleep there after asking permission with a soft meow. Luckily he isn't the fatter of the two:)
Cats are incredible.
Have you tried just adding more blankets. I never run heating at night because I find that even at 0c outside I can just stack up 4 blankets and still be warm.
Having slept outdoors a lot in the past, I think many people underestimate the importance of the ground/floor/bed in keeping from freezing.
If you have excess blankets, it could make more difference to put them under you as opposed to above you. Even spruce branches or cardboard will lift you from the ground enough to make a difference in a pinch.
This is why homeless people are stereotyped as sleeping on cardboard with a newspaper as a blanket. Because they actually do, because even paper is a great insulator that you can scavenge easily.
I discovered this on my annual backpacking trip during a particularly cold winter. I sleep in a zero degree bag in a hammock, but my bag has most of the insulation on top so my back was freezing. Next year I brought a nice thick blanket to line the hammock and I’ve always been comfortable since.
Your weight compresses most of the insulation beneath you, and the hammock itself provides less than no insulation. If you aren't, you should put the blanket on the outside of the bottom of the hammock (suspended beneath it), so it has more volume and thus insulation.
Interesting, I wouldn't have thought of that. The blanket is pretty dense and relatively incompressible, but I'll have to try that and see if the difference is noticeable (if I can figure out how to attach it like that).
I agree - I packed an air mattress to sleep on during camping when it was cold on the ground. The air didn't insulate as well as I expected so I was freezing from below.
There are so many things around us that are such incredible achievements in comfort over not having them. It is a good experience living without some of them for a while to get appreciation for it:
- electricity
- heating
- beds
- running water
- showers
- drains (sewer? I mean being able to pour out water in the kitchen, not having to carry it out)
- washing machine
- (etc)
I regularly go on multi night wilderness backpacking trips–they are a big part of my life and make me happy for many reasons, but the appreciation they bring for the comforts of modern life is big every time.
After several days in the backcountry the comforts come back bit by bit on the way home: a soft and supportive seat in the car, warm or cool air at the touch of a button, hot coffee and eggs brought to your table, fresh water from the tap, a hot shower with soap, clean soft sheets and a supportive bed. It’s really a visceral experience of all of the comforts we take for granted every day.
I’ve been going on trips like this my whole life, and I always love being out there, but the experience of coming back to comfort and convenience never gets old.
The problem with air mattresses in cold weather is that they conduct heat. The gas inside the mattress absorbs heat from your body and transmits it to the edge of the mattress and into the outside air. To be prevent this heat loss, cover the whole air mattress with a blanket or put an insulator between your body and the mattress.
I spent many years in the tropics without air conditioning. But I had a water bed. The waterbed works similarly to the air mattress, absorbing your body heat and emitting it over a large surface area. This is great when the weather is hot. The bed also has a large thermal capacity. Cover it with a blanket during the day and leave it uncovered at night. Then when you lie down at the beginning of the night, it will still be cool from the early morning.
How well would a waterbed work in a camping situation?
> I packed an air mattress to sleep on during camping when it was cold on the ground. The air didn't insulate as well as I expected so I was freezing from below.
Interesting bit of trivia: at -40 it's not necessary to specify C or F, that's the point where they're both the same.
When I was a kid in the boy scouts, they had an award they gave out when the total low (with wind chill) on the days you camped added up to -100F. I got the award one weekend - one day was -60, the other was -40.
Obviously it's -39, and since -39C and -39F are different you'd now be required to specify. If you knew which scale the 1 degree was from it wouldn't be difficult.
I spent a full winter sleeping on a second story screened porch (it was a private porch off my very small bedroom and I figured that since I didn't mind sleeping in the cold, I might as well save the floor space in my bedroom and move the bed to the porch).
On the very coldest nights I would get out my 10˚F mummy bag, and use a couple blankets on top of that, but I was never uncomfortable, even well below zero (Fahrenheit).
Getting _out_ of bed was pretty miserable at times, but it was only a few steps to the door into the house.
0C? That's pretty warm. I sleep naked under a goose down duvet with the window open in an unheated bedroom even when the outside is -15 C. Now I'm on my own it does get a bit cooler than before but when there were two of us under the duvet it was plenty warm enough.
I remember having one... It had no ground wire... Thinking about it now, I'm really surprised I never got electrocuted or that it didn't catch on fire, it was really flimsy.
Electric blankets aren't intended to be used while you are in the bed. Your own body heat can keep the bed warm and they're dangerous to run while sleeping. Their intended purpose is to warm the bed before your own body is in there to do the work. It avoids the first few minutes of sheet shock when jumping into a cold bed before your body heat catches up to the task.
An interesting study, but spatially non-uniform dynamic thermal location and local partial biomass availability seem like factors here. While direct heaters, ground source heat pumps in particular, can be exceptionally efficient and functional year round, they ultimately have fixed exchange locations and must bring the whole house volume to temperature. Whereas a cat heater is dynamic: for example while I am sleeping the cat is liable to apply all 15 watts directly to my face. I can anecdotally report a significant insulation effect as well. Or while I'm desperately trying to complete a final sprint the cat may decide that my keyboard is the ideal radiative location. A proper heating model probably needs to take this into account albeit with a lot of chaos and quantum theory mixed in as the cat may or may not be providing heat until observed. And cats in general are equipped with local biomass harvesting and conversion capabilities that may further alter supplemental fuel costs.
Never the less I certainly look forward to continued research on this topic!
Sorry to be the downer on this article, but if you head to oneroof's "news" page [0] you'll see their entire raison d'être is to push out articles for NZ's media outlets to reproduce in the hopes of encouraging the continued misallocation of capital into residential real estate. So them making light of the house heating situation is in extremely poor taste considering such issues as NZ being the only developed country in the world with significant instances of rheumatic fever [1] and a quarter of South Island renters being stuck with cold and mouldy accommodation [2] (which they couldn't leave for weeks due to the pandemic).
Can you connect the last dot for me and explain why "(mis)allocation of capital into residential real estate" is bad for warmth, affordability, and fighting rheumatic fever?
The NZ renting experience can best be described as punitive, and for foreigners coming here can be quite a shock at what it entails (no pets [0], no hanging pictures, short-notice no-fault eviction, good luck getting plumbing and electric fixed, etc. etc.). But relevant to this discussion is the extremely poor state of the housing stock. It is woeful beyond belief.
The house I rent is in a town with median household (i.e. avg of 1.5 earners) income of US$44,000, and my rent is US$1,100/month. One of the inclusions in that cost is what I call the "mould room", which is not just uninhabitable but I don't dare even enter it without a mask [1]. I run a dehumidifier in my kids room for 14hrs/day or they would cough all night in bed - it sucks about 4L moisture per day. But I put up with that because my landlord hasn't put up rent too much (is about 15% behind market at the moment) and the alternatives that come on the market are scarcely any better.
Lest you think I'm being dramatic or that my situation isn't generalisable, I suggest you read this recent reddit thread of NZ renters detailing how cold their houses are [2]. Particularly funny are comments from Norwegian, Swedish, Canadian migrants saying they've never felt as cold in their life as in a New Zealand bedroom.
The only way out of this situation is to buy your own house. That's it. There is no incentive whatsoever for landlords to improve their capital once someone is paying off their mortgage, and covid slowdown notwithstanding, that is guaranteed to be the case due to extreme supply shortage.
Perhaps you were confused by my use of the phrase "capital into real estate" - that doesn't mean building more and certainly never means improving existing stock - it just means buying the same existing houses for more and more money each year. The effect of this, of course, is that people renting these houses have to save more each year for a deposit if they ever hope to own. In this town, in the last 12 months, if you saved anything less than US$12,000 towards your deposit you are now further away from owning a bottom quartile house than last August. It is now estimated that for those born after 1990 (everyone < 30 yrs old) ~60% will never own, because their disposable income will never cover a deposit. So those people will be putting up with cold, expensive, diseased housing for life.
OneRoof, being a real estate advertising company, makes its money on listings priced based on the value of property, and so want to see both higher prices and/or higher turnover. Against typical microecon thinking, these factors are correlated in NZ, so in short all they want to see is higher prices. In other words they make more money the harder it is for renters to escape the cold, and thus put out an endless stream of PR guff about rags-to-riches stories of people flipping houses, hoping (and often succeeding) that 'serious' news outlets like the NZ Herald run the stories uncritically.
That is why "cats are warm lol" is so offensive coming from them.
[0] Adding further insult in the context of this article
[1] If you're wondering why I haven't put in a solution for this - it's a hilly town and this room is embedded in the Earth up to about half way, a not uncommon feature around here. Since it wasn't waterproofed properly, it's about as moist as a rainforest in there, and the only fix would be knocking two walls down and rebuilding that whole section of house.
Presumably, high rates of investment drive up prices (since supply is somewhat constrained). High prices reduce the ability for people to purchase, so they have to rent, but then higher purchase price means the investors have to increase rent too. This means there is a lot of demand at the low end of the housing market, where houses aren't as well maintained/insulated/upgraded
Investing in housing should lead to building more housing, which will lower prices for everyone. Is the investment only used to renovate existing housing?
Buying a house (in NZ) is a liquid investment with better returns than the stock market and no captial gains tax. Building involves much more risk, nimbyisn, geographic constraints. The cost of building is more closely related to the cost of labour than it is materials, so even at higher prices margins aren't nessecarily better.
Usually it's used to re-sell and re-mortgage the same run-down Victorian houses over and over again with no improvement at all. As a student tenant I had my fair share of renting horror houses that were lethally dangerous
The first time I took my cat camping it was much colder than expected. At bed time I filled a bottle with hot water and wrapped my cat up in a blanket with it. Being a cat, he immediately squirmed his way out of it and started walking around the freezing tent.
I was starting to get worried until the little guy realized he could just barely squeeze into my zipped up sleeping bag.
It was a big mess of fur and limbs all night, but we both managed to stay warm enough.
'take' would appear to be the correct tense – this is apparently just about the first time. i recently discovered that cats can actually be trained, to a certain extent (mostly behavioural tricks as opposed to commands). i wonder if it's possible to guide certain cat traits for your own benefit. imagine Cat goes out hunting and returns, leaving a rabbit at your feet, while you are preparing the campfire. my guess is that it would be possible to encourage, though not so to choose your dinner.
I actually did train this same cat in a lot of the classic dog commands. He'll sit, shake, lay down, and roll over on command. It's certainly harder to train a cat on commands but it ended up being a little easier than I thought it would be going in.
I think it helps to have a cat that's highly food motivated. While following orders comes naturally to a lot of dogs, training a cat feels more like a bartering system. He'll put up with my silly requests in exchange for treats that he likes. If the treats stopped coming I doubt he would keep following instructions for long.
Bertha's Kitty Boutique was already on this in 2005...
> Bertha's Kitty Boutique reminds you that heating bills are going to be high this winter and on these cold winter nights, there's nothing more comforting than a warm cat. (PURRING) And if one cat can warm you up, think of what 6, or 10 of 'em could do.
These are skinny designer cats, these are big heater cats (MEOW) who use tuna for fuel and produce enough BTUs to heat up your whole bed and your bedroom too. And we have them in all styles to go with your bedroom decor -- tabby cats, angora, Siamese, orange cats, black cats -- anywhere from 30 pounders up to the family size.
Heater cats from Bertha's (MEOW) Hurry in while supplies last.
“ A 3kg cat has a heat output of 14.8 watts, or 129.65 kilowatt-hours...”
Playing fast and loose here. That’s 129.65 kilowatt hours per year. 14.8 watts is 0.0148 kilowatts of course. Kilowatt hours are a measure of total energy output over a given time not instantaneous output.
Also that's kWh summed up over the year. Cats have constant output, but for house heating you'd want to concentrate it to just ~3-4 months. So we're closer to 50-60 cats at that point.
You would be surprised how often this error is made. Even in quality newspapers journalists tend to use kWh as a unit of power instead of energy. That probably happens because of the 'hour' part in kWh.
People have no problem understanding that km is distance, and km/h is speed.
With energy and power the units read less intuitively: energy is J (Joule) and power is really just J/s (Joules per second), but we call that W (Watt) and for purposes of energy consumption the unit is kWh, which is really just a fancy compact way of saying 3.6 MJ (Megajoules).
So we have journalists writing about new dams that produce x TWh and cats that produce 129.65 kWh. (Per what? Day? Month? Year? Lifespan of the dam?)
Since getting a dog I’ve learned dogs and cats both run a degree or two hotter than we do — 38-39 C as against our 37. Noticeably adds to the comfort level, even if there’s only one under the covers.
Not sure where they got their cost estimate from, but I spend a lot more than $250/year on each of my two cats (and 250 NZD is only ~160 USD). Still, fun article :)
Apologies if it's insensitive, but I'm curious what the financial cost of "putting cat down and acquiring new cat" would be; mere intellectual curiosity.
Despite adding a month to the mortgage, it was a good news story. Cat full recovered within a day or two, and the joy my kids get from this gosh darn cat makes it worth the expense. (just as long as it doesn't make a habit of getting eyeball splinters - freaking gross).
Very thankful to have the means that enable a spur-of-the-moment $1,650 expense not affecting too much of the future.
Well, just to put it in perspective, I've spent more than their budget on vet bills alone over the past few months, nevermind cat food, flea/worm tablets, toys etc. They must have cats that don't need anything but the minimum amount of cheap food, never get sick...
Ya, one of my cats has had nothing wrong with him. The other got into some pills I left on the counter and had $8k in vet fees to treat poisoning, thank god for pet insurance.
The ideal number of cats per home in New Zealand is zero. Cats prey on local wildlife, much of which is near extinction as it is because of introduced predators including humans. Those who advocate for banning cats in New Zealand have a pretty strong case.
I live in NZ and my partner has an indoor-only cat. It's considered a bit weird here, we've had friends politely suggest that keeping a cat indoors is cruel. In principle indoor cats are just as good for bird life as no cats, but either is a tough sell.
Is there evidence that cats are actually a problem for local wildlife in NZ? Which species are under threat?
I've found this belief is common, and it may well be true in some places (including NZ), but it's not true in many, too. In the UK for example there's no evidence to suggest cats are a problem for bird populations[1]. There is a lot of wild extrapolation going on with this subject.
Often I see people quoting statistics such as an absolute number of bird deaths caused by cats, not really understanding that you can't tell from just that statistic whether or not the species are under threat.
I will say cats are crazy escape artists. We had to confine ours after a move to make sure they didn't make a mess or escape while we reassembled our house but the room didn't have any doors so we piled up boxes and they just got better and better at escaping. This escalated to one of our cats jumping up and slamming a box off the top to make his escape.
I had a couple of cats. I went on holiday, and left them at a cattery for a couple of weeks. The older one managed to open the cat-room door by pushing down on the handle, then ran up and down the long corridor until noticed by the cattery owner. Then the younger cat died, and I got a new younger cat. I went on holiday again, by which time the older cat's back legs were knackered and he couldn't jump up. But I warned the (different) cattery owner that he was an escape artist. This time, he taught the younger cat how to push down on the handle, and again they ended up running up and down the long corridor. Cats are escape artists.
I was rearranging a bedroom once, and flipped the mattress vertically, long-ways, against the wall to make room to move everything else around. Literally as I was lifting the mattress a cat started climbing up it to reach the new, higher vantage point in the room.
It's pretty easy, just ensure that all cats sold for anything apart from breeding are desexed, and have significant penalties for allowing unregested animals to breed.
PAWS in Seattle will give you a cat and it comes for a coupon for a free spay or neuter (often kittens are too young at adoption time). Of course the fee for adoption is higher than the cost of the surgery, so you are paying for it whether you use it or not.
There are often very cheap city/county options too: where I live its less than $30 for a spay/neuter + rabies vacc (significantly less than a private vet would charge).
the GP is saying that across a sufficiently large population... you will have cats escaping (some subset of the population), and thus a feral population will eventually form.
It does not necessarily need to be your cat that kicks this off.
One trustworthy indoor cat steward can get away with it; a large enough population will naturally contain some careless people, or even surprises (hit by a bus)
As a side note, my friend has a cat that had one of its front legs amputated after being attacked by a dog. After that it was much better - couldn't kill as much wildlife, couldn't escape so easily, much better for snuggles.
In the Anthropocene around 90% of all macro-organisms will go extinct. Banning cats does not change this overall figure. Even for New Zealand cats are a lesser problem compared to the rats and possums brought there by humans and those are just a drop in a barrel compared to the overall effect of humanity. For example, New Zealands best solution to the rat and possum problem is bio-chemical warfare¹.
The whole "ban cats" movement is nothing but humanity shifting blame towards one of their oldest allies. New Zealands native birds are not endangered by cats, but because someone removed almost all of their forest homes during the last two centuries².
If you want to prevent the Kōkako and other native birds from going extinct, instead of protesting against other peoples pets, go and fund some breeding program or forest preserve.
As for the title itself (and probably my understanding of NZ english), for me “panel heater” means one of the modern electric powered planar sources of IR radiation and after living for few months in flat heated by only such things I’ve found that only reasonable way to use such electric heaters is that these things somehow warm up your cats and nothing much else in the room ;)
I had to dry out my boots once with a panel heater, after a passing driver decided to enliven my rainy-day walking commute by driving through an overflowing gutter and drenching me from head to toe.
I wouldn't have liked to try it with a cat instead...
Unfortunately, in my experience, cats are endothermic. Give a cat a heat source – a sunny patch, a heated blanket, or a warm belly – and they will cling to it until all the heat is absorbed out of it. Cats need heat sources to thrive, so they will be very unhappy if operated as a heat source.
Tough to say. All I saw was a blank white page with no text or images. After jumping through some hoops I saw all that javascript was for a couple paragraphs of text. So I'll just mirror it here for others.
As an aside about the actual content: cats come with vet bills you have to be able to pay if you want to ethically own one. That's a huge expense.
Cat v panel heater: Which is better?
6:34 AM, 24 Aug 2020 James Powers
Cats are affectionate, panel heaters are not.
How many cats do you need to heat an energy-efficient home?
It’s the question on everybody's lips. Well, maybe not everyone's lips, and it's possible this is a niche topic, but it is relevant.
A 3kg cat has a heat output of 14.8 watts, or 129.65 kilowatt-hours - the metric commonly used by power companies to show you how much energy you're using.
These numbers are important when it comes to the design and building of energy-efficient homes, as the heat output of random things like cats can lead to overheating.
For example, to be certified Passive House, a building must have an annual heating demand of less than 15kWh per square metre to maintain a comfortable temperature.
For a typical Kiwi house of 150sqm, the annual energy demand would be 2250kWh. The number of cats required, therefore, would be 17.35, but let's avoid chopping cats and round up to 18 whole cats.
This equates to 1 cat per 8.33sqm.
Easy as. Let’s bulk order a cat litter.
Cats cost about $250 per year to ‘operate’ which equates to a total running cost of $4,300 per year*. This is a bit more than $475 for gas or $675 for electric, although the installation cost is less for cats.
* The calculations have used an average heat load. In reality, the heat load will vary considerably throughout the year. You will need significantly more cats in colder weather and less during mild weather.
In hot weather, you can, of course, let the cats out, but this represents a significant waste of resources if you continue to feed them. And as cats cannot be used for cooling, you would also have to introduce an alternative cooling system such as lizards or other cold-blooded animals.
In addition to vet bills there is grief at their passing. Nobody talks years later about that wonderful heater they had back in 1998 and how despite the furnace repair bills, they’d do it all over again just because of how it made the most pleasing sound when it ran, almost like a cats purr.
Then there was the couple who got a kitten. The first night it woke up down around the husband's ankles. It started to walk forward until it found its path blocked. It then dug into his thighs to climb out, and found itself launched from the bed along with husband and blankets.
(Source: the ex-wife. I don't think the kitten contributed to the breakup of the marriage, though.)
Our cat acts as an alarm clock. Pretty close to 5:30 every day. The problem is that no one in the house needs to get up at 5:30 (except the person that doesn't want the cat to shit inside).
Assume a spherical cat. As the cat gets bigger, the surface to volume ratio goes down, so the cat gets hotter. This will lower its metabolism, which means that the food calories increasingly go toward storage, which makes the cat get even larger. Asymptotically speaking, the cat tends to become a furry blob of melted lard.
Smaller animals produce more heat per unit volume, and meat isn't a very efficient form of energy transfer, so you're probably better off filling the house with mice.
$675 for 2250kWh of electricity? They're doing something wrong.
That's 30 cents per kwh of heat. Even if you just use resistive heating you beat that in every state, and probably most of the rest of the world.
But it's better than that, because that's heat not electricity. 4 watts of heat transfer for 1 watt of electricity is reasonable with a heat pump, so it's $1.20, or if you consider that co-efficient of performance (COP) is typically measured for cooling and we should be counting the electrical waste heat here a COP of 5, which makes their number $1.50 per kwh.
However, even that can't be compared, because in NZ, electricity charges include all distribution costs. Americans typically only look at the generator charge per kwh, ignoring transmission, lines and any daily charges.
The breakdown works out approximately [1]:
30% - generator
10% - national transmission network
26% - local lines operator
20% - retailer
13% - sales tax
New Zealand has split transmission, generation, retail, and the local lines operator into separate companies. There are generators without retail and at one time there were retailers without generation (I think they were all killed by the wholesale market). The government runs long-distance transmission (through a crown corporation) while local lines operators can be private.
The amazing thing is that in a country of <5 million people, there are 22 retailers.
> The amazing thing is that in a country of <5 million people, there are 22 retailers.
On one hand it's amazing bit on the other it shows a certain level of inefficiency. In my view one of NZ's biggest problems when it comes to productivity is the need to duplicate effort in so many areas.
They do, but cost of electricity is relatively consistent because cost of production is (or at least upper bounded, some places have particularly cheap electricity because of geography). In this case the trick is that 30nzd=20usd and they didn't feel the need to clarify the currency.
It's a New Zealand website on a New Zealand TLD that specifically qualifies, "for a typical Kiwi house", but you thought it wasn't clear that they would be dealing with NZ dollars?
One cat stuffed under the blankets at night is a significant improvement. But as you add more and more cats, the improvement becomes only incremental.
I eventually learned that two cats was really the best one could hope for. Best positioning is between the legs, and with the blankets pulled up over my head with a little crack for breathing. After that, adding more cats doesn't help much.
If I was still cold after two cats, I had to break down and turn on the heat.