Note: This information is intended as general advice only and may not account for your unique circumstances such as usage habits, home and power provider. 

We don’t feel the cold quite as much as we do when trying to get off to sleep. A cold or damp room can not only be harmful to our health and prevent us from getting proper sleep. At the very least, dealing with a cold room makes getting to sleep really difficult. But how do you heat up a home while asleep safely and without blowing out energy costs? We cover this and more here.  

In this guide you’ll learn things like:

• The importance keeping a clean home environment
• Why moisture impacts your sleep
• Managing heating on a budget 

Wintertime bedding to keep warm

Before any heating or air treatment, take some time to determine if your bed is made for the time of year. Having bed clothes that keep your body at the right temperature can provide a better sleep and reduce the work that heating needs to do over night.  

A popular configuration for winter bedding includes:

• Mattress protector
• Thick underlay or mattress protector
• Fleece or flannel fitted sheet
• Fleece or flannel regular sheet
• Heavy duvet cover (e.g. thick cotton)
• Thick, heavy down duvet inner
• Throw or blanket 
• Thick down pillows

Look for sales in your local homewares store - many times throughout the year you’ll be able to pick bedding up for 50% off. You may also want to stagger acquisition of good winter bedclothes throughout the year as sales come up.

Close the curtains or blinds

Even a home with double glazing can lose heat through the windows. Shutting off the home’s windows with curtains or blinds will significantly reduce this heat loss overnight.

We’d recommend thermal curtains if you have the option to change these (or hopefully have these already!). These are thick curtains with a layer underneath the outside visible layer that has excellent thermal properties that don’t allow the cold air to get from the window into the room. Even single-glazed homes can notice big improvements from thermal curtains. When coupled with double glazing, however, households will enjoy warmer nights and fewer crying windows.  

Safe, night heating

Now you’ve got the bedding sorted to guarantee you a cosy sleep, it’s important to also make sure the air is a comfortable temperature as well. As warm as your bed can be, if you’re breathing in cold air, it can keep you awake or leave you feeling less than 100% when you wake up.

Heating at night requires extra attention to keep it safe and efficient. If you’re sleeping, you need peace of mind that your heating won’t put the household at risk. 

You’ve got a number of options when it comes to heating, but which one you choose will depend on what you’ve got installed now, or what’s within your budget. One of the more common options for heating a room or number of small rooms is a column heater. These upright, free-standing heaters can be wheeled around into any part of the house and plugged into the wall. They do not use a fan to push heat out, but rather the metal columns heat up and give off heat. Typically, a column heater will come with a timing function and thermostat function. 

This means it can be set to switch off/on at a given temperature threshold and also cycle on during stretches of the night where it’s colder. While you may need to experiment a bit here, having a heater that can flick on to coincide with temperature drops is an excellent way to save on heating costs. As a start, you can check the weather forecast online and note when the temperature drops at night then start the cycle on then. You can then set it to stop as the temperature increases again. Along with the timer, the thermostat will detect when the room is heated to the set level and switch off accordingly. Once the temperature drops, it will switch back on.  

One thing to be conscious of with a column heater; you don’t want young kids getting up and touching it in the middle of the night. If you’ve got older kids, or a baby who sleeps in a cot, a column heater is no problem. But with toddlers who go walkabout, you may want to think strategically around the placement of the heater or explore other options. 

Another popular method of heating is through a ducted heating system or heat pump. These systems will be controlled via a central panel or remote where you can also control temperature and timing. If you have one of these systems (or plan to get one installed), you should take care not to run the temperature warmer than it needs to be. Comfortable room temperature for sleeping is generally considered to sit between 18-20 degrees. On a cold winter night, 18 degrees should feel reasonably warm to sleep. Each system and household is different, so try some different options and see what works the best. The idea here is you’re running as minimal heating as possible to get a comfortable night’s sleep. 

Dehumidifier to dry out the air

Heat is just one part of the equation. Like we’ve talked about in our other guides on heating the house, the moisture in the air has a big influence on how efficiently rooms can be heated.  

Drier air takes less time to heat as there are simply less particles to absorb heat. To reduce how much moisture there is in a specific room, we’d suggest using a good dehumidifier to dry it out before going to sleep. A dehumidifier will pull out moisture in a contained space, into an inbuilt collection container which you’ll need to empty periodically (how often depends on how damp the room is). 

Some things to note about a dehumidifier appliance:

• They work best in a contained room and aren’t designed to treat the whole house at once.
• There are different settings on dehumidifiers that determine how hard they work to pull moisture out. Try a setting around 30-50% humidity and observe how much moisture you pull from the air. 
• You should be able to ‘feel’ a room that’s dry - the temperature will be slightly elevated and should smell better than before. 
• The windows are a tell-tale sign that a dehumidifier has been working - crying windows should be gone with a dehumidifier on.
• Check the energy efficiency rating of the unit - you want to make sure the system isn’t too power hungry. 
• These appliances should be run in bursts as opposed to all the time - otherwise you may end up spending more than you need to on power. 

If you’ve got a specific room that needs to be at optimal temperature and good air quality during the night, a dehumidifier is a great choice. Try running it a few hours in the baby’s nursery or in your bedroom before going to sleep. You might be surprised at just how much of the heating job is reduced. 

24 hour ventilation

But what about an entire home that experiences issues with dampness, mould or poor air flow? While a dehumidifier and ventilation system aren’t really an ‘and/or’ choice, a home that has a ducted system in place to continually move air around should see fewer issues with heating and air quality than one without. 

A ventilation system does a number of things. First it will circulate old air out of the rooms in the home and push clean, new air into the rooms. This process prevents rooms from feeling musty and you should notice fewer, or no instances of mould build up.

Secondly, part of this air cycling process involves a filtration system. This means that particles like dust and other allergens can be caught by the filter and removed from the living environment. This may help the household to get a better sleep at night as the air they’re breathing is usually much cleaner. Please note that the impact of a ventilation system on your home and the household can vary depending on a number of factors. We suggest speaking with a ventilation specialist for more information on this. 

Ventilated homes will be easier to heat with the removal of old, damp air. For some homes, the process of ventilation has enough of a net temperature increase that no other heating is required at nighttime. 

These systems are also designed to run lightly, all day. Their draw on power should be much lower than that of a dehumidifier. If you have a particular damp room, however, there’s no harm in experimenting with the dehumidifier as well.