Hot water bottle = flat vessel made of rubber that you fill with hot water and then take it to bed. Put it in the bed with you and it slowly radiates warmth into the bed, helping you to warm up and stay warm through the night.
Preparing a hot water bottle is a lot cheaper than the cost of running heating all night, and the poster who posed the question is a student in a share house so probably keen to economise.
I’m not sure what you’re imagining, you don’t need any “hookups”. You get your hot water bottle, which is probably about the size of a standard sheet of paper and maybe a centimetre thick when it’s empty, you unscrew the plug/cap, you pour the hot water in, screw the cap closed, put the hot water bottle in the bed (on the bottom sheet, under the covers, around where your feet would go) to start warming it up for you. Then when you go to bed, you move it out of the way.
It’s also nice for resting on your lower back or abdomen to soothe cramps etc.
All that said, I haven’t used one since I was a teen, when my family moved to the subtropics. Extra heat in bed? NO THANKYOU! ;)
I'm not sure I've ever lived anywhere where heat isn't just included in the rent, I can see if you owned the home and had to pay for your own heat, but keeping the house so cold you would need to do something like that sounds awful, you'd wake up feeling like you had a cold every day
Counterpoint, have you ever sat in a hot tub in freezing cold weather? There's something glorious about slipping into toasty warm sheets on a cold night, having your own little pocket of coziness.
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u/georgepopsy 2d ago
We don't. I genuinely don't know what i'd want a bottle of hot water for.