Our Heating Bill Doubled — Three Engineers Missed It, A Candle Found It In Four Minutes

The first bill arrived in November and I assumed it was a mistake. Two hundred and forty dollars, for a two-bedroom house we barely heated above nineteen degrees. December came in at three hundred and ten.

Three heating engineers came out over the following two months. The first said the boiler was running better than most units half its age. The second bled the radiators, checked the flow temperature and the pump, and found everything in spec — but he said the thing that turned out to matter: “The heat is going in fine. It’s going out somewhere.” The third walked the house with an infrared thermometer and got readings he described as completely unremarkable.

Between them they charged me a little over two hundred dollars and changed nothing.

In February my father-in-law visited. He is a retired joiner. He stood in the hallway with his coat still on, asked for a lit candle, and found it in four minutes — a gap I had walked past every single day for eighteen months.

What follows is his method, which costs nothing, and the three places an ordinary house actually leaks heat from.