Ex-wife and I went 2-years without using the heater, only a couple of space heaters. Wasn’t too bad. Then one day I nailed the sagging breaker box to the wall. Bam! Heater stopped tripping once and for all. That house has probably burned down by now.

One year the heater did break in winter. That was the year we had three cats, so it was all three in the bedroom, me, my husband, two space heaters, and every blanket in the house. It was cozy but tiring.

I used to heat with a wood stove, so in the evenings the house was nice and warm and then the fire in the stove would burn out while I slept and by the time I had to get out of bed the house would be ice-cold. Just starting the fire again took a while (I wasn’t very good at it) and then everywhere not right next to the stove warmed up quite slowly.

(Until the house warmed up, my dog would stay so close to the stove that it would scare me. Those old-fashioned stoves get very hot and there’s nothing beyond your own good sense that will prevent you from touching them and instantly being severely burned. He didn’t have much good sense but apparently he had enough never to touch the thing…)

Apparently experienced people can make it so that the embers in the stove stay hot overnight, which makes getting the fire going again much easier, but I never got the hang of it. On the plus side, when you live in a sparsely-populated forested area, burning wood for heat is much cheaper than burning oil or gas. I wonder how much coal would have cost… I did see one house with a furnace that one would have to shovel coal into like an old-fashioned steam-locomotive fireman.