Die steigenden Energiepreise durch den Ukraine-Krieg dürften vor allem der Grund für die Heizungskrise im letzten Jahr gewesen sein. In Milionen Haushalten war es nicht richtig wam.
I don’t want to regulate heating. I just find it unfortunate that the survey doesn’t mention the target temperature that people couldn’t afford. If someone says “it’s too expensive nowadays to heat my flat to 25°C” it’s a completely different story to “I had to live in constant fear of my water pipes bursting from frost”.
We have an ongoing climate crisis and at the same time there’s an energy crisis due to the war in Russia. I think keeping that in mind, it should be obvious that we have to cut back a bit in terms of comfort.
If it’s indeed more than a third of Germany sitting in their flats freezing that’d be dramatic. But my feeling here it’s at least partly people whining around about their horrible fate.
Headlines like this are perfect propaganda for pro Russian politics and in a second step may harm the people in Ukraine - which in many places are REALLY suffering from cold temperatures. Because they are cut off the grid and/or because their flats were damaged in battle.
Maybe my gut feeling ist wrong and we indeed have a significant number of people living at dangerous temperatures. But from my perspective the entire statistic is useless if we don’t have more information. I just tried to find statistics with groups of the household incomes along with the number of households in that group. If we knew the average household income of someone who is +/- in the 38th percentile of people in Germany, that might be a starting point. However that would still contain many simplifications (How modern is the flat in terms of isolation? What’s the primary energy source etc.? How big is the flat? How many people live in the household?).
It is very difficult to judge on a total number of a statistic unless you know the assumptions and methodologies behind it. In this case they apparantly didn’t even try to work with scientific evidence. They just wanted to create a clickbaity article and thus made the question as broad as possible so as many people as possible will anwer with “yes, I’m affected”.
By the way: wasn’t this thread originally liked to an article from the newspaper “Die Welt” rather than DeStatis? DeStatis from my perspective is much more reliable souce than “Die Welt”. Also the original post reported 38% of people freezing while DeStatis writes about 5.5 million people. 5.5 million would be around 7% which is a HUGE difference and sounds far more realistic.
I personally think it primarily matters if you feel too cold. You are factually not being able to bring your environment to a temperature that feels comfortable for you.
When it’s about Germany and from personal experience I would say 90%. Everyone reasonable just put the thermostate down to 17-18°C because they don’t need a constant t-shirt temperature inside, even less in the whole house/flat. But the ones complaining… I couldn’t enter their homes without starting to sweat. In fact I did not heat at all last year. Even with minus double digits outside (the winter on average wasn’t that cold but the first half of December was brutally cold) my rooms would never sink below ~18,5°C as everyone araound me seems to need to live in tropical conditions.
You believe 90 % of people in Germany heat their apartments to tropical warmth? Or that 90 % of people saying they couldn’t pay their heating are lying because they want tropical warmth? Just want to confirm if I understand you correctly.
Actually all those ancient looking thingies on heaters are thermostates, with 1 being 12°C, 2 being 16°C and so on up to 5 being really tropical (=28°C) and 3 markings between the numbers one for each degree (plus a star symbol for anti-freezing starting up above 5°C). They may sometimes not be that precisely calibrated after decades but they are still starting up and stopping exactly at a set temperature.
Oh if you have those and they still work then yes. All except one flat I used to live in here in Germany had either one that didn’t work anymore or one that basically just had anti freeze, slightly warm and tropical, no numbers or anything.
If it doesn’t work, you can (should) ask your landlord to replace it. Or spend a few euros and get an electronic one, preferrably with a remote sensor (because I care more about the temperature near my desk or sofa than the one next to the radiator)
I don’t want to regulate heating. I just find it unfortunate that the survey doesn’t mention the target temperature that people couldn’t afford. If someone says “it’s too expensive nowadays to heat my flat to 25°C” it’s a completely different story to “I had to live in constant fear of my water pipes bursting from frost”.
We have an ongoing climate crisis and at the same time there’s an energy crisis due to the war in Russia. I think keeping that in mind, it should be obvious that we have to cut back a bit in terms of comfort.
If it’s indeed more than a third of Germany sitting in their flats freezing that’d be dramatic. But my feeling here it’s at least partly people whining around about their horrible fate.
Headlines like this are perfect propaganda for pro Russian politics and in a second step may harm the people in Ukraine - which in many places are REALLY suffering from cold temperatures. Because they are cut off the grid and/or because their flats were damaged in battle.
What percentage of those claiming they didn’t had the money to warm their flats do you guess are just whining around unjustified?
Unfortunately, I cannot answer that.
Maybe my gut feeling ist wrong and we indeed have a significant number of people living at dangerous temperatures. But from my perspective the entire statistic is useless if we don’t have more information. I just tried to find statistics with groups of the household incomes along with the number of households in that group. If we knew the average household income of someone who is +/- in the 38th percentile of people in Germany, that might be a starting point. However that would still contain many simplifications (How modern is the flat in terms of isolation? What’s the primary energy source etc.? How big is the flat? How many people live in the household?).
It is very difficult to judge on a total number of a statistic unless you know the assumptions and methodologies behind it. In this case they apparantly didn’t even try to work with scientific evidence. They just wanted to create a clickbaity article and thus made the question as broad as possible so as many people as possible will anwer with “yes, I’m affected”.
By the way: wasn’t this thread originally liked to an article from the newspaper “Die Welt” rather than DeStatis? DeStatis from my perspective is much more reliable souce than “Die Welt”. Also the original post reported 38% of people freezing while DeStatis writes about 5.5 million people. 5.5 million would be around 7% which is a HUGE difference and sounds far more realistic.
I personally think it primarily matters if you feel too cold. You are factually not being able to bring your environment to a temperature that feels comfortable for you.
When it’s about Germany and from personal experience I would say 90%. Everyone reasonable just put the thermostate down to 17-18°C because they don’t need a constant t-shirt temperature inside, even less in the whole house/flat. But the ones complaining… I couldn’t enter their homes without starting to sweat. In fact I did not heat at all last year. Even with minus double digits outside (the winter on average wasn’t that cold but the first half of December was brutally cold) my rooms would never sink below ~18,5°C as everyone araound me seems to need to live in tropical conditions.
You believe 90 % of people in Germany heat their apartments to tropical warmth? Or that 90 % of people saying they couldn’t pay their heating are lying because they want tropical warmth? Just want to confirm if I understand you correctly.
Funnily most people in Germany do not have thermostats where you can input a target temperature.
Actually all those ancient looking thingies on heaters are thermostates, with 1 being 12°C, 2 being 16°C and so on up to 5 being really tropical (=28°C) and 3 markings between the numbers one for each degree (plus a star symbol for anti-freezing starting up above 5°C). They may sometimes not be that precisely calibrated after decades but they are still starting up and stopping exactly at a set temperature.
Oh if you have those and they still work then yes. All except one flat I used to live in here in Germany had either one that didn’t work anymore or one that basically just had anti freeze, slightly warm and tropical, no numbers or anything.
If it doesn’t work, you can (should) ask your landlord to replace it. Or spend a few euros and get an electronic one, preferrably with a remote sensor (because I care more about the temperature near my desk or sofa than the one next to the radiator)