Several days ago while feverishly working on CheatZILLA I got tired of being distracted by Seven so I put his bed in my computer room and locked him in here with me so he would settle down and let me work. I made the discovery that with the door closed the room would start heating up a lot.

Being broke and out of work this was good since I have only been running the heater in the morning to heat the house up just enough so it's not so hard to get out of bed. For most of the winter when I've gotten cold during the day I either wrap up in a blanket or build a fire. The living room has one of those wood burning stove inserts so it's quite good at heating that room up.

Yesterday I hung towels in front of the door to the computer room to see how much insulation it would provide, and so that the dog could come and go on his own. I also wanted a way so I could vary how large the opening was so that I could possibly regulate how hot the computer room gets. With the door closed it has been getting up has high as 79 on its own, which tends to get a bit stuffy. Amazingly, the towels work just about as well as having the door closed!

Last night I decided what the heck, why not save even more money and shut off the heater and move my bed into the computer room for a night and see what it's like. Normally at night I close the door to the computer room because of all the noise that all the computers make. I was afraid that it might be too loud although I know I can usually get used to most noises and sleep through them.

When I went to bed it was 75 in the room so I didn't need too many blankets like I have in my bedroom. Sleeping was easy. The noise quickly blended into white noise and the couple of times I woke up during the night I thought it was raining then I remembered I was in the computer room. When I got up this morning the room had fallen down to 70, but the rest of the house is now at 58!

Now I am thinking maybe I need to start scavenging wood so I can build myself a loft bed and stick all the servers under it. I found pictures online of a really cool looking loft bed that also has lots of drawers, a big storage space, a computer hutch, and a trundle bed at the bottom. Looks like a good model for what I want to do! "Free" heat is great! Of course this isn't going to be good come summer... :-/