How Older People Relate to the Private Winter Warmth Practices of Their Peers and Why We Should Be Interested

There is good reason to be interested in how older people in ageing societies organise their winter warmth. Winter mortality rates are highest amongst this group. Several initiatives have accordingly sought to alleviate the fuel poverty some older people experience at this time. Yet many older people are also wealthier than ever. This leads to alternative anxieties about how their potentially extravagant home heating could exacerbate wider climate change. This paper pursues the contention that future policies relating to both issues stand to benefit from a fuller appreciation of how current older person households relate to the private winter warmth practices of their generational peers. Building on studies that explore the dynamics of domestic thermal convention and consider how to engender new sustainable energy norms at home, it presents findings from a serial interview project with a diverse sample of older people in the UK. We consider whether these respondents connected their actions to the idea of a wider generational mode of managing domestic winter warmth and the reasons why they seldom did. We end with the implications of this situation for further research on domestic energy norms and interventions aimed at the winter practices of this growing sector.