[Photo credit: Flickr Creative Commons photo by John Davis]

Turn on the heat? No way!

thermostat-home-inside
Our thermostat shows 66 degrees after having been pushed there not by our furnace — which we haven’t turned on once yet this year — but after having been pushed up naturally by a balmy 75-degree, late October day in Colorado.

Heat?

Who needs it?

We don’t – at least not until November this year, a record for us here on Colorado’s Front Range.

We’ve lived in our Aurora home for six years, but we’ve never made it this far without turning on our natural gas furnace. Pretty often, there’s a snowstorm here in October, or at least an extended cold snap or two.

Not this year — although we did have to “tough” it out a bit on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week when temperatures outside dipped into the 30s and then into the 20s, respectively, and we watched the mercury drop to 54 inside our house.

Yes, the four of us shivered a bit – but it really wasn’t that bad (humans have become way too wimpy, refusing to adapt to anything outside of a 70 to 75-degree temperature range). We hit 54 during the night, when all of us were snuggled under plenty of blankets in our nice toasty beds. And, if you wear a long-sleeved shirt and two sweatshirts while you’re awake, you’re plenty warm, even at 58.

Is saving energy ‘stupid’?
Ok, so my wife Christine, hasn’t been too happy lately about my penchant toward wanting to set personal records some might call bizarre and others might call stupid. (Personally, I think conserving energy is anything but “stupid”.)

house-300
A picture of our Aurora, Colo. home, BSP — Before Solar Panels.

At one point on Tuesday night, as 40 m.p.h. winds howled outside and the thermometer on our window read 38, Christine turned to me and said, “Let’s just say we turned on the heat only once in October, OK?!”

I refused to cave.

I’d seen the all-important 10-day Weather.Com forecast (an absolute multiple-times-a-day must read for this weather junkie), and I could see warmth – plenty of it – on the horizon, although I have to admit I definitely wasn’t feeling much warmth, literally, or figuratively, as my wife stormed upstairs to our bedroom and prepared to leap into our four-blanket bed.

Unusually warm fall in Denver area
As predicted, the cold didn’t last.

After just two days of colder, more normal October-like weather, the Denver area pushed back into the 60s Thursday (Oct. 28). It hit 75 today (Oct. 29). A high of 73 is on tap for tomorrow and a comparatively balmy 63 forecast for Halloween, a date on which, according to local Front Range lore, it is inevitably cold and/or snowy.

Not this year – which, according to the NOAA, globally, is shaping up to be either a record-tying or recording breaking year in terms of warmth.

Could we make it all the way to the middle of November without turning on the heat here in Aurora, Colo., which is supposed to be a northern climate?

So, now that we’re clearly going to make it to Nov. 1 without having turned on the heat in our Colorado home, how far are we going to make it before we fire up our trusty, if also annoyingly loud, forced hot air heating system?

It’s looking a lot like we’re going to make it deep into November based on, yes, that must-read Weather.Com 10-day forecast. Highs for the next week and a half are predicted to be 60 or above, with two days slated to be in the 70s.

If this forecast is accurate, we’ll be pushing it to at least Nov. 7 before our furnace – which has been sitting idle since late April 2010 — gets fired up again.

Dec. 1, here we come!
Could we make it all the way to the middle of November without turning on the heat here in Aurora, Colo., which is supposed to be a northern climate?

Whether we go “heatless” until mid-November – or beyond! — might depend more on how much my wife can take than on the weather outside, which, quite likely thanks to global warming, is well, you know, extremely warm for this time of year here on Colorado’s Front Range.

Call me “crazy”, call me “bizarre,” call me “stupid” if you want, but I’m willing to string this no-heat thing along as far as we possibly can – to mid-November, maybe to Thanksgiving, or, dare I say it, to Dec. 1!

Just don’t tell my wife, who’s thinking our whole “heatless” gig is going to go away sooner rather than later.

noaa-glob-warming-graph1
Global temperatures have been going up consitently for three straight decades, as this NOAA bar graph clearly shows. [NOAA graphic]
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