this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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What percentage of those claiming they didn't had the money to warm their flats do you guess are just whining around unjustified?
Unfortunately, I cannot answer that.
Maybe my gut feeling ist wrong and we indeed have a significant number of people living at dangerous temperatures. But from my perspective the entire statistic is useless if we don't have more information. I just tried to find statistics with groups of the household incomes along with the number of households in that group. If we knew the average household income of someone who is +/- in the 38th percentile of people in Germany, that might be a starting point. However that would still contain many simplifications (How modern is the flat in terms of isolation? What's the primary energy source etc.? How big is the flat? How many people live in the household?).
It is very difficult to judge on a total number of a statistic unless you know the assumptions and methodologies behind it. In this case they apparantly didn't even try to work with scientific evidence. They just wanted to create a clickbaity article and thus made the question as broad as possible so as many people as possible will anwer with "yes, I'm affected".
By the way: wasn't this thread originally liked to an article from the newspaper "Die Welt" rather than DeStatis? DeStatis from my perspective is much more reliable souce than "Die Welt". Also the original post reported 38% of people freezing while DeStatis writes about 5.5 million people. 5.5 million would be around 7% which is a HUGE difference and sounds far more realistic.
When it's about Germany and from personal experience I would say 90%. Everyone reasonable just put the thermostate down to 17-18°C because they don't need a constant t-shirt temperature inside, even less in the whole house/flat. But the ones complaining... I couldn't enter their homes without starting to sweat. In fact I did not heat at all last year. Even with minus double digits outside (the winter on average wasn't that cold but the first half of December was brutally cold) my rooms would never sink below ~18,5°C as everyone araound me seems to need to live in tropical conditions.
You believe 90 % of people in Germany heat their apartments to tropical warmth? Or that 90 % of people saying they couldn't pay their heating are lying because they want tropical warmth? Just want to confirm if I understand you correctly.
I'm saying that a lot of people in Germany are brain-washed morons. And the overlap between those and the loud ones feeling a need to voice their complains is big.
That doesn't mean that there aren't low-income people that suffer from higher energy prices, but that's more a question of not having enough money to easily handle any unexpected costs. Those are however not typical the people talking loudly about their financial problems in general.
But then Germans just installed a record number of new gas-heaters. Because they are brain-washed by right-wing media with stories of how the evil Greens in government are trying to ban heating and forcing everyone to install those crappy heat-pumps that don't actually work and are just a scam, because obviously physics works differently in the Pensioneer Republic of Germany somehow. As I said I haven't heated for years as I live surrounded by average Germans and they will do a lot of complaining about their required supplementary payments up to a low 4-digit number (the usual renting contracts in Germany include a pre-payment per month for heating calculated based on expected costs per year) instead of smarten up and maybe not heat their mediocre-insulated flats to 24+°C...
(For reference there are my parents who also heat to a more reasonable 20°C. Yes they had to pay money last year -there was a short price-shock after all- but then their pre-payments increased by 20€/month and so they were covered when they got their yearly bill last month -for one year including last winter- that included an additional payment of about 5€ for their real heating costs. Yes, that's still money. No that's not budget breaking for the avergae loud complainer. Ohh and btw... the government implemented a price stop that they are letting run out early this winter as actual prices are down to far below that cap again.)
A lot of the complains are just Germans loving to complain, also fueled by the conservative opposiiton via public media they have big influence on -they were in power for 16 years before after all and for the majority of Germany's existence- telling horror stories about the total failure of government since the day they came into office, so they will get back to government soon for another decade or two of letting everything decay and sabotaging an energy transition that should be in the works for decades already.
You know, the same people that just today loudly announced how Germany's energy transition has failedand we need to go back to coal and nuclear... when that transition is actually a decades long plan and just from November 2022 to November 2023 in comparison the share of renewables -with most things needing years of construction- increased from ~48% to 77%.
EDIT/Addon: It's also very telling that we get the big stories doemstically and internationally how Germans couldn't heat their homes. Have you noticed how they again used total numbers without context? As barely anybody will read the text to see that it's 6,5% of the population, so far below the European average of more than 9%. That's also nothing new: We got the same "Oh, god! Germany is importing nearly 20% of Europeans share of Russian fossil fuels!"-stories last year... and no one could ever be bothered to compare that to share of population, share of industrial production or share of exports/GDP. All those numbers would have shown 20% +/- a few %, showing Germany was exactly on average. But that was not the stories that they wanted to tell.
Reporting badly about Germany sells: Internationally as people love to hear about Germans allegedly suffering and domestically as they do anything to get the failures back into office whose policies for decades lead to todays situation.
Funnily most people in Germany do not have thermostats where you can input a target temperature.
Actually all those ancient looking thingies on heaters are thermostates, with 1 being 12°C, 2 being 16°C and so on up to 5 being really tropical (=28°C) and 3 markings between the numbers one for each degree (plus a star symbol for anti-freezing starting up above 5°C). They may sometimes not be that precisely calibrated after decades but they are still starting up and stopping exactly at a set temperature.
Oh if you have those and they still work then yes. All except one flat I used to live in here in Germany had either one that didn't work anymore or one that basically just had anti freeze, slightly warm and tropical, no numbers or anything.
If it doesn't work, you can (should) ask your landlord to replace it. Or spend a few euros and get an electronic one, preferrably with a remote sensor (because I care more about the temperature near my desk or sofa than the one next to the radiator)
I personally think it primarily matters if you feel too cold. You are factually not being able to bring your environment to a temperature that feels comfortable for you.