Five and a half million Germans could not heat their homes sufficiently in 2022 due to lack of money
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.
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Unfortunately, the people were neither given nor asked for the "sufficient" temperature. While I don't appeciate that climate measures are forced on the poor only, there's many people that waste a lot of energy on heating in the winter. I don't think 22°C+ should be the norm. If you put on some warm clothes, 18°C are absolutely fine. Personally, I like colder temps indoor and I go for 16°C in the winter as long as there's no mold issues.
That assumes everyone experiences heat and coldness the same which isn't the case. I for example need around 20 degrees to feel alright in warm clothing. But on the other hand I am fine in around 43 degrees in the summer and wouldn't use any AC below that.
Also young kids and older people have different needs as well.
If you wanted to regulate this, the time and money needed to care for everyone who get an exception from this rule could likely be used instead to heat everyone's home.
Also, many people with autoimmune conditions experience worsened symptoms when it's hot out.
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.
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.
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)
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.
I'm saying that a lot of people in Germany are brain-washed morons. And the overlap between those and the loud ones feeling a need to voice their complains is big.
That doesn't mean that there aren't low-income people that suffer from higher energy prices, but that's more a question of not having enough money to easily handle any unexpected costs. Those are however not typical the people talking loudly about their financial problems in general.
But then Germans just installed a record number of new gas-heaters. Because they are brain-washed by right-wing media with stories of how the evil Greens in government are trying to ban heating and forcing everyone to install those crappy heat-pumps that don't actually work and are just a scam, because obviously physics works differently in the Pensioneer Republic of Germany somehow. As I said I haven't heated for years as I live surrounded by average Germans and they will do a lot of complaining about their required supplementary payments up to a low 4-digit number (the usual renting contracts in Germany include a pre-payment per month for heating calculated based on expected costs per year) instead of smarten up and maybe not heat their mediocre-insulated flats to 24+°C...
(For reference there are my parents who also heat to a more reasonable 20°C. Yes they had to pay money last year -there was a short price-shock after all- but then their pre-payments increased by 20€/month and so they were covered when they got their yearly bill last month -for one year including last winter- that included an additional payment of about 5€ for their real heating costs. Yes, that's still money. No that's not budget breaking for the avergae loud complainer. Ohh and btw... the government implemented a price stop that they are letting run out early this winter as actual prices are down to far below that cap again.)
A lot of the complains are just Germans loving to complain, also fueled by the conservative opposiiton via public media they have big influence on -they were in power for 16 years before after all and for the majority of Germany's existence- telling horror stories about the total failure of government since the day they came into office, so they will get back to government soon for another decade or two of letting everything decay and sabotaging an energy transition that should be in the works for decades already.
You know, the same people that just today loudly announced how Germany's energy transition has failedand we need to go back to coal and nuclear... when that transition is actually a decades long plan and just from November 2022 to November 2023 in comparison the share of renewables -with most things needing years of construction- increased from 48% to 77%.
EDIT/Addon: It's also very telling that we get the big stories doemstically and internationally how Germans couldn't heat their homes. Have you noticed how they again used total numbers without context? As barely anybody will read the text to see that it's 6,5% of the population, so far below the European average of more than 9%. That's also nothing new: We got the same "Oh, god! Germany is importing nearly 20% of Europeans share of Russian fossil fuels!"-stories last year... and no one could ever be bothered to compare that to share of population, share of industrial production or share of exports/GDP. All those numbers would have shown 20% +/- a few %, showing Germany was exactly on average. But that was not the stories that they wanted to tell.
Reporting badly about Germany sells: Internationally as people love to hear about Germans allegedly suffering and domestically as they do anything to get the failures back into office whose policies for decades lead to todays situation.
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.
For just sitting around 18 or 16°C is way too cold.
Even in warm clothing.
It's almost as if different people who are used to potentially drastically different climates may have a different amount of tolerance for the cold.
Yes, but in the absence of other factors, "cold tolerance" is something that can change by habituation.
I'm perfectly fine sitting at my desk all day with 18°C in shorts and hoodie.
Found the Canadian
Sorry
Proving my point, eh? ;)
Nah, it's fine.
I wish I could do that. Unfortunately my rented flat requires 23°C of heating to prevent mold thanks to bad windows that cannot be fixed due to the house community not wanting to pay for replacing them. And yes I'm practicing proper venting, supported with several devices for timing. I'm so glad I'll be moving out soon.
If you put on some warm clothes, 18°C are absolutely fine.
Not if you're very young, very old, or have any one of an endless list of health conditions
I think there are also different mentalities. Just last winter, I had a similar discussion, where someone explained to me that the room heating is meant to fully offset the temperature, so he can walk summer and winter in shorts, t-shirt and barefoot. So it's 23°C in winter.
While I'm used to wearing jogging pants and socks indoor during winter, so 18°C is fine for me.
Then again, you also have to adjust for personal preferences, different sex, different heating infrastructure etc. But 23°C to go shorts and barefoot in winter was an extreme reveal to me, that people do something like this as well.
You do understand that this is pretty much the same discussion that was made regarding showers in Germany? When we’ll paid politicians gave advice about personal hygiene with a damp cloth instead of taking regular showers?
there is studies that concluded an increased risk of getting colds, when the indoor temperature is consistently below 20 °C
There are indeed studies but they place the low cutoff at 18°C not at 20°.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK535294/
For countries with temperate or colder climates, 18 °C has been proposed as a safe and well-balanced indoor temperature to protect the health of general populations during cold seasons.
There is studies that 16-20C is the optimal temperature for sleeping
And sleeping is about 1/3 of the day, where your metabolism, circulation and breath behave quite differently than during awake times.
If someone feels more comfortable at lower temperatures while awake that is perfectly fine. If all of the population heats less though that will result in more colds.
I actually like colder temperatures, but I’ve noticed that due to the wall structure (or something) the outer walls ‘radiate’ a lot of coldness right onto my bed which is next to said wall. (Of course cold does not radiate, the opposite is true). To keep that within bounds, I’ve found it helpful to keep an awfully high room temp, around 24c.
That and there being serious building structure issues that cause a ton of mold in winter when not heating