Korean Job Discussion Forums

[madtownhustl]

heating bill next month! to people with a floor heater, do you leave it on all winter, or turn if off when you leave your apartment?? it taakes forever for it to heat up at night if i turn it off before work in the morning... any suggestions or info would be great.

i could of hijacked another thread but decided not to.

[ChilgokBlackHole]

[UknowsI]

I move it up and down from 20 to 23 degrees. Usually turn it down to 20 when I leave my apartment and turn it a little up when I come home. The building in itself will not have turned completely cold, so it doesn't take too much time to heat up, and I get a burning hot floor within short time. So if I'm cold I'll just sit on the floor (I don't have any chairs anyway). I also only keep one room warm most of the time. Closing the door to the bedroom and only keeping the bedroom warm cut my bill in half since there is a strong draft in all other rooms.

[madtownhustl]

i just have one room, with 15 foot ceilings and huge windows... so hard to keep it warm with it at 30C. even. terrible.

[nomad-ish]

i leave it down low all the time now too, and spend most of my time at home sitting/sleeping on my electric blanket.

i don't have a thermometer in my apartment, but i'd guess it's at about 18C.

[orosee]

Here's some good news: Ondol and tap water are on differrent circuits! I know since yesterday because when I came back to my apartment, the rooms were cozy warm (these days I always leave it on the "three flames" setting) but my kitchen and bathroom pipes were frozen.

I could take a day off today because I couldn't shower and had to wait for the fix-it guys. Apparently someone had shoveled a mountain of snow on top of the pit where the pipes and valves were. Took 3 hours to melt the ice block, there were still some ice bits left that plugged the pipe as I was going to take a shower, but it seems to be okay now. Not sure about this night though.

Anyway to hell with the money, I want my rooms to be superheated when I turn in from the cold! Two nights less in Itaewon will take care of any extra expenses anyway.

[bassexpander]

We can leave ours off and our house gets no colder than 19 degrees at the coldest times thanks to the neighbors below. Often it hangs around 20. When it hits 19, I run it for an hour or two so it gets back up to 20 or so. It stays off every day while we're gone, so our bill should be pretty low.

I'll give you a hint, though. My wife bought one of those clothing steamers, and THAT thing will heat up her room like nothing else in a very short time. You don't want to run it too long, or humidity will soon exceed 50% and you'll be in a rainforest! I air the house out twice a day, so we don't have to worry about mold. Keeping the living room dry sucks the extra moisture out of her room, anyway.

[djswayde]

I left mine on by accident over the night and turned it on and kept it on pretty liberally (my room is rather large with big windows) and had to pay 100,000 won for the month. Whoops.

[Juregen]

[mcviking]

I hate to be that guy but I don't put my heat on at all unless i am taking a shower. Heating bill last month 10,000. 16-19 is comfortable to me.

[samcheokguy]

I bought an electric blanket, and as I live in an apartment we have cheap cheap electric during the winter, and expensive gas. In summer the bills switch, expensive electricity cause of the A/C.
-But I taught in Russia before, so my idea of cold is a little, uh, extreme.

[BoholDiver]

73 pyeong is like 5 bedrooms. Do you mean 7.3 pyeong?

[orosee]

[tzechuk]

A 73 pyeong place with a 40K gas bill?!

Before I got divorced our home was close to 50 pyeong (and yes, it has 4 bedrooms), and my gas bill was consistently close to 300,000 won per month.

Now I have a 25pyeong place and my gas bill is about 130,000 a month. No complaints. It keeps my daughter warm, which is the main thing.

[eamo]

58 pyeong here.....gas bill usually 150,000 pm in Winter.