For a month or so the touch screen on our thermostat – it’s the kind that spies on you – kept displaying a message instead of the current indoor temperature. The message said something about allowing the thermostat to monitor our energy use in order to increase efficiency, but I never read it all the way through. The message was accompanied by a button underneath that said “OK”. I ignored it, thinking: no good can come of this. Then one day my wife decided she wanted to know what the temperature was. She went over to the thermostat and saw the message. “What’s this?” she said. “An offer to monitor our energy use,” I said. “How do I get rid of it?” she said. “I’m not sure,” I said, “but whatever you do, don’t press …” I watched as my wife pressed OK. After a week of monitoring, the thermostat appeared to reach the conclusion that no one lived in our house, and imposed a corresponding heating regime: basically just enough to keep the pipes from freezing. At first we don’t notice, because the weather is unseasonably warm. Then suddenly it isn’t. “This says it’s 9C in here!” my wife shouts, standing before the thermostat with her hands tucked in her armpits. My office shed, which is heated by a small, inadequate electric radiator, is suddenly the most comfortable place to be “I wish I had the technical expertise to explain why this is all your fault,” I say. “We can’t live like this,” she says. “Fortunately,” I say, “you can just override the system by turning the dial clockwise.” “Oh,” she says, turning the thermostat up to 20C. “That’s all right then.” “Unfortunately,” I say, “as soon as it reaches the next programmed adjustment in the schedule, it will go back.” “Fix it!” she says. “Luckily, I have the app on my phone, so I can edit the schedule at will, from anywhere.” “Yes, please,” she says. “Sadly,” I say, “the thermostat has mysteriously disconnected itself from the wifi, and now refuses to acknowledge that we even have wifi.” “There must be something we can do,” she says. “We can move house,” I say, “but we shouldn’t show prospective buyers round on cold mornings.” The cat and the dog follow me from room to room, thinking: he must be heading somewhere warmer. Only the tortoise is content. He has achieved a state of suspended animation normally denied him by the kitchen’s underfloor heating, and spends his days lying motionless, butted up against the washing machine. I’m envious of this approach to winter: the next time he knows anything, it will be mid-March. My office shed, which is heated by a small and wholly inadequate electric radiator, is suddenly the most comfortable place to be. I rise early just to get out there. In my wife’s office – formerly the middle one’s bedroom – the radiator is stone cold. She wears a coat while she works, and comes out to my shed three times a day to complain. “It’s lovely in here,” she says, sitting down. “Ooh, snow,” I say, looking out the window. “Perhaps I could come out here and work with you,” she says. “Someone needs to be inside,” I say, “turning the thermostat back up whenever it turns itself down.” “I’ve done it four times today,” she says. “It doesn’t help.” “That’s weird,” I say. I follow her back into the house to investigate. The thermostat is, for the moment, still set to 20C. The radiators at the back of the house are all on, but the radiators at the front of the house are cold. This forces me to reconfigure my mental picture of our central heating’s plumbing, which I always imagined to be like a chain spiralling upwards, on which radiators were strung at intervals like beads. Now I must consider the possibility that it’s more like a log flume – rising steeply at the back of the house, cascading down at the front, and blocked somewhere near the apex. Or maybe there are two distinct branches, one operative, one failing. Either way, this no longer seems like something I can blame on my wife’s button-pressing. “I now believe there is more than one thing wrong with our heating,” I tell my wife. “Are you about to explain both of them to me?” she says. “Yes,” I say. “The first is the unfeeling intransigence of our robot thermostat.” “The second is a plumbing issue caused by the rash installation of a heated towel rail in the bathroom.” “There was already a heated towel rail there,” my wife says. “It just didn’t work.” “Honestly, the sheer hubris of it,” I say. “What’s wrong with room temperature towels?” “If it’s the plumbing I’ll call Mark to fix it. What should I tell him?” “Please don’t tell him anything I just said,” I say.