This Is How We Heat Our House Without the Furnace (The Mexican Way)

Go look at your thermostat. Seventy-two, and it will say that every hour from now until April, the furnace lighting, the blower roaring, the meter spinning like a slot machine. You know the January envelope. Two, three, four hundred dollars, for one month, for air. And you have done things: turned it down and got complaints, bought the space heater that raised the electric bill, bought the thermostat that talks to your phone. And the envelope came anyway. Mi amigo, your house does not need the furnace to be warm. It needs the furnace to be warm the LAZY way. A few months ago I showed you how to cool a house with a pipe in the ground; this is the other half. Every one of these comes from my grandmother's house in Jalisco, which never had a furnace, and I never once went to bed cold in it. And at the end I tell you plainly where the old ways stop and the furnace takes over, because this is the one video where overselling can hurt somebody. ⚠️ SAID PLAINLY, BECAUSE PEOPLE DIE EVERY WINTER TRYING TO STAY WARM: never burn charcoal indoors, not in a fireplace, not in a pan, not in the garage with the door cracked. Never run a propane heater indoors that is not rated for indoor use, and never in a bedroom. Never run a generator in the garage. Never leave the oven door open to heat the room. Charcoal, propane, gasoline and an open oven all make carbon monoxide, which has no smell and puts a family to sleep that does not wake up. Put a CO detector on every floor and by the bedrooms. Nothing in this video burns anything in your living space. That is the whole point of it. 🔥 THE FURNACE STAYS ON. It becomes the backup at 62, not the main event at 72. That one change alone is about a third of the bill. In this video: • WHEN: set it all up in October on a mild weekend, not in January with the wind coming through the window. • 1. THE SUN (free): walk your house at noon and put your hand on the south wall. Brick, stone and stucco over block hold heat like a rock by the river. Curtains and blinds OPEN at sunrise on the sunny side, CLOSED at sunset. The floor and walls are a battery; charge it by day, blanket the windows at night. • 2. CLOSE THE HOUSE DOWN: you are heating rooms nobody is in. Shut the doors and vents on two or three unused rooms and live in the warm ones in the evening. Not half the house, the furnace has to breathe; any furnace man will tell you the same. • 3. THE KITCHEN IS THE FURNACE: move the cooking to the evening, bake in winter, let the soups sit two hours. When the oven is done, OFF and door CLOSED, and it gives its heat back through its own walls for an hour. Never the open door. • 4. THE BRICK: an ordinary clay brick warmed on the back of the stove or in the cooling oven, wrapped in two or three layers of towel, placed at the FOOT of the bed ten minutes before you get in. Warm, never scalding (if you cannot hold it in a bare hand, wait). Always wrapped. Never beside a baby or someone who cannot move it. A hot water bottle is the same idea in rubber. Six children, six bricks on the stove every night. • 5. THE TEN-DOLLAR FIXES: window plastic film kit (tape, shrink with a hair dryer, a sealed dead-air layer like a double pane) · the door SAUSAGE along the bottom of every outside door and every closed-off room (a pant leg full of rags works) · the CEILING FAN reversed, clockwise on LOW, pushing the warm ceiling air back down the walls. Reverse in October, forward in May. • 6. THE WATER HEATER BLANKET: a $20 insulation jacket on an older tank in a cold garage pays for itself in months. Read your label first, some new tanks say do not add more, and on a gas heater never cover the top, the controls, or the air intake by the burner. THE ARITHMETIC: plastic $10, sausages free or $8, fan switch free, brick free or a $12 hot water bottle, water heater jacket $20. Under sixty dollars and one October Saturday. Against the envelope: seventy-two around the clock in a leaky house heating four empty rooms. Nobody in the chain, not the gas company, not the furnace company, not the space-heater aisle, makes a dollar off a brick in a towel. Tell me in the comments what your January bill was last year and what it is this year, I want the number. And your county and what your walls are made of, because a brick house in Texas and a wood house in Minnesota are fighting different wars. I read every one. My wife's channels: Clean The Mexican Way · Cook The Mexican Way