Heat The Person Not The Room
With soaring energy costs and everyday living expenses heading in one direction, effective cost savings make sense and never more so than heating your home in winter.
But your body is its own central heating system so it makes good sense to maximise the effectiveness of that heating system to full effect and at a fraction of the cost of heating a whole house or room.
If you can drop your house thermostat by just a few degrees, without feeling cold, you could be saving hundreds of pounds a year if not thousands.
Consider your body as a "Virtual House". Now in your actual house most of us have a heating system of some sorts and the boiler for this is usually inside so it's kept relatively warm as is your hot water cylinder. These are the primary heat sources in your house and your heat source then feeds your radiators and hot water system to provide all round warmth.
In your "Virtual House" your core (the torso, vital organs and large muscle groups at the centre of your body) are your body's primary heat generators, your internal "Boiler and Hot Water Cylinder" and your extremities (your head, hands and feet) are the "Radiators"
You need fuel to keep your personal heating system working. For humans that means food which generates your metabolism and thus generates heat. You need to ensure you keep your boiler insulated so the heat produced is retained and maximised so it works efficiently keeping your body temperature at the right level.
OK so you "could" wear your big, bulky favourite outdoor puffer jacket.....that'll work fine. But for indoors, walking around in a big, bulky sleeping bag, isn't very practical!
This is why the best indoor thermal solution is achieved by layering up when it's cold. You should start with a good quality Base Layer with appropriate Mid Layers and Outer Layers when required, to give you all the necessary core insulation you need to keep your body's "Boiler" performing at its optimum level.
Now, many people consider the top half of the body to keep warm and disregard the bottom half. That's a big mistake. Your quads and glutes are massive heat generators......don't neglect them! It's like leaving the front door open when it's snowing outside.
The trick is "LAYERING" for all parts of the body. If you layer up whilst indoors without needing to look like a hot air balloon, then you will retain heat and the use of your household thermostat is vastly reduced saving you a lot of wasted cash. Always consider wearing Thermal Leggings as part of your Layering System. It will pay huge dividends. So do consider our COMBO Deals that combine the top with leggings.
In a house of course, you don't want to stop the heat convection from the radiators because you are looking to heat the air around you for warmth.
With your "Virtual House", it's a bit different as you want to keep the heat that you generate localised next to the skin. As your blood moves round the body and reaches your extremities (hands, head and feet) the ambient temperature will cool the blood which is close to the surface of the skin at these extremities and as the blood returns to the heart on its natural journey around your body, it is colder and therefore takes more energy to warm it back up again. What you need to do is return that blood back to the heart with more retained warmth, and that's where your personal insulation system pays dividends. Also as your fuel (food) begins to run out, you produce less energy to re-heat the blood efficiently and ultimately you will get cold because you can't maintain your body heat.
If this happens a lot, the blood never reaches a good temperature and the end result is feeling cold, shivering (the body's natural reaction to trying to warm up) and potentially hypothermia in extreme cases.
If you are very active say running around a lot in football or rugby perhaps, this happens less often because the blood will move faster as the heart works harder. This means that the blood will spend less time close to the surface of the skin and is therefore less susceptible to cooling simply because it's moving too fast. End result in situations like that........sweating! The body's natural answer to over-heating!
So, you have to support your Boiler's hard work by insulating the "Radiators" as much as the boiler itself so as not to undo all that energy input in the first place. Good Gloves and potentially a Liner Glove with an over glove where required, warm thermal Socks and a good warm insulating fleece hat, will assist the body in maintaining that prefect warm feeling.