Caring for Comfort? How Social Relations Shape Household Practices of Home Comfort as Care

Social relations between people are fundamental to how energy is used in household practices related to home comfort, or caring practices. The interplay between social dynamics and home comfort in caring practices is essential to understand energy usage within households as a social phenomenon. A transition to sustainable resource use is imperative and entails reducing as well as shifting the consumption of energy in household practices, which implies more knowledge on the connection between home comfort and care in the everyday life of households. The paper explores this connection through home comfort as caring practices based on qualitative interviews from two different datasets, including households with different types of heating technologies. The data points to care as encompassing how household members perform practices related to home comfort and energy use across the different household technologies. Thus, care extends comfort beyond individual well-being to encompass the nurturing of family members, household materials, and technologies.