This will be our 3rd winter in Calgary... the first thing we noticed was that the house we were renting was incredibly warm, even in winter, and our heating wasn't turned up all that high.

They seem to be very well insulated, or at least ours was (no idea what the current house is like in the depths of winter - we only bought it 6 months ago).

The only downside I can see to very open plan houses is that you can't shut doors to hide away from the kids so easily!

Heating them isn't a problem though, and although I can't remember what our heating bills are off the top of my head, it isn't a huge sum

Too true, I have to go and hide in the pantry when i'm on the phone!

My main bugbear with open plan was when my son was toddling and he would be all over the kitchen. He would invariably turn up right behind me when i was taking a large pan out of the oven. My kitchen in the UK was blocked off and very child friendly.
All 3 of them still run around the kitchen island when they get excited and it's usually when i'm busy in the kitchen, drives me nuts.
Open plan kitchens and kids don't go very well together.

Heating wise, it's all very toasty and cosy in the Winter, we have the sun on the back all day and even when it's -25 outside we could be roasting inside with no heating on.

Thats good news about the insulation, good point about open plan as I will be moving with a toddler, oh well, it will keep me fit trying to keep him out of the kitchen area!

At out last house we installed a barn type half door (I bought a door and sawed it in half) that was enough to block off the kitchen without it being visually a separate room. Depends on the layout, of course, it wouldn't work where we are now.

Our current house, or cabin, is very much open plan. A snag with it is that you can't isolate smells or sounds, chuck pine needles in the fire and the whole house smells like a detergent commercial. Very nice. Fail to leave the litter box and the whole, well I guess you see the problem. Living with an Abba fan is a problem as there's no where for her to be closeted.

Our house is largely open plan on the ground floor. We are all-electric and our bill is about $150/month.

We heat the basement, keep the thermostats on the ground floor at 21 and do not heat the upstairs, other than my office, because there is no need.

The windows and exterior doors are all double glazed and the seals are as tight as a nun's chuff.

Souv,

What temp to you heat the basement to?

Ours is finished and I set the manual slidey thermostat at 15ish when we're not down there and 20 when we are. I suspect it would be better left at a constant 18 or so?

My project to rip of window trim and fill in the chuffing great gaps around the window frames that I believe exist is rising up the priority list as the temperature drops!

Good question. Our basement is basically split into two main rooms, a TV room and a bedroom, both of which have heaters. When he still lived here, the Boy never turned on the heater in his bedroom so we had to jack up the other one. Now he is gone, will be able to leave the door open and run both heaters, probably at 21. We won't really know until winter sets in.

For a moment I thought you were paying $150 x 12 for equalised billing. Then I read the later post about winter.

We're all electric (heat pump/aircon, baseboards if needed). Bills in summer are around $150-$170 but they hit $400 in winter. Equalised is around $265.

We are on equalised billing.

I live in a new, but open plan house, and my heating bills are no where near what some have quoted. We are on mains tho, I appreciate that makes somewhat of a difference perhaps, but even so, those numbers seem high. The forced air heating means if you have rooms not in use, you can close the vents (for instance, in one of our spare bedrooms). The advantage to heating most / all of the space is that pipes etc don't freeze, and I have been told by someone who knows more about such things, that it takes less energy to keep a room moderately warm, than let it cool right down and heat it back up. For that reason we keep the heating on a digital thermostat, set to go down in temp (or up, as the case may be in summer) and come on an hour before we get home. We have it at a reasonable temp in the evening when we are about, and then turn it down a bit lower overnight when we are under our duvets. It took some working out initally to get temperatures we liked but we seem to have it sorted now! We can even program it to be different (e.g. later kick in time) on weekends! Our furnace / boiler is in the basement, so we don't need to heat the basement per se, the furnace seems to keep it reasonable down there (we use ours as a laundry room, storage etc). Another tip I was told when I moved here was in winter, keep your curtains open during the day to let the sunlight heat the home, in summer, close them during the day to stop that happening - it does seem to make a difference!

Not a good idea to close them at night when it's very cold. It isolates the windows from the warmth of the house and moisture in the air will freeze on the glass. Then melt.

We have flimsy Canadian curtains (Laura Ahsley where art tho!) so no danger of them totally insulating our windows!

On the window note too, we have low-e coated, argon filled windows, which also helps heat control.

On the other hand Sears do sell really thick insulated curtains too. There is no rule says you cant double up and have pretty curtains on the inside and thick insulating ones behind them.

At some point I shall get around to getting some decent curtains, will probably have them made to order, but right now we make do with some Home Outfitter's ones!

Sorry, I thought from your comment about seeing what happened in winter that your $150 monthly hadn't taken account of winter.

So let's see if I have this right...you are all electric and your total bills for heating, lighting, cooking and hot water for a year are $1800.