The heating habit doctors are warning older households about this winter

Turning the heating off to save money feels sensible with bills up again. For some people it carries a risk, and there is a smarter way to stay warm.

A family in a cold living room on a winter day, snow visible outside

When bills climb, a cold home is hard going, and hardest on the very young and the elderly.

The energy price cap rose again on 1 October. A typical household paying by direct debit now faces a bill of around £1,723 a year, roughly £60 more than before. So as the evenings draw in, a lot of us are doing the same thing: turning the heating down, or off, and reaching for another jumper.

It feels like the sensible thing to do. But health experts have been urging people to think twice, and the warning matters most for older households.

What the warning is really about

The NHS advises keeping the rooms you regularly use at a minimum of around 18°C through the colder months, and points out that this matters all the more if you have a health condition. Doctors have been cautioning that older people, and anyone living with a heart or lung condition, should be careful about letting their home get too cold simply to save money.

The point they keep returning to is not that you have to heat the whole house. It is that the rooms you actually live in should not be allowed to get uncomfortably cold.

The choice that feels impossible

This is where most of us get stuck. Heating the entire house all day is expensive, and nobody wants that bill landing in January. So the heating goes off, and the room you are sitting in slowly cools down around you. It can feel as though the only options are a painful bill or a cold room.

In practice there is a third option: heat the room you are in, rather than the whole house.

A flat where the bedroom is warmed by the Vortex Air Pro Plus while the rest of the home stays cold

Heating the room you are using, rather than the whole home.

That is closer to what the doctors are actually suggesting. Give priority to the bedroom and the living room, the places you spend your evenings, instead of paying to warm an empty spare room or a hallway nobody sits in. Framed that way, the problem becomes a good deal smaller, and it is what a growing number of UK homes have quietly started doing.

Warming one room, in minutes

Many of them have turned to a bladeless hot and cool machine that warms the room they are in quickly, without firing up the central heating for the whole house. The one most people settle on is the Vortex Air Pro Plus, a single machine that heats in winter and cools in summer, so it earns its place all year rather than sitting in a cupboard for half of it.

What owners tend to mention first is how simply it fits into the evening. A few things stand out:

It warms the room you are in within minutes, so you feel it where you are sitting.
A built-in thermostat holds the temperature, so the room stays comfortable without constant adjusting.
It is quiet enough to sleep next to, and runs twice as quietly as the original Pro, so it suits the bedroom overnight.
It is bladeless, with nothing exposed to touch, so it is safe around grandchildren and pets.
It is A plus energy rated, with three heat settings, ten speeds, a tilting head, a remote and a timer.

But does it actually warm a room?

It is the question people ask most, and a reasonable one. It genuinely heats, with three heat settings and a thermostat that holds the room where you set it, rather than a fan that only moves cooler air around. And because the same machine cools you through the summer, it is not a purchase that spends half the year in storage.