An issue with keeping yourself warm with clothing is some hotspots get too warm, and others too cold. Like the armpits usually get too warm, but your exposed hands too cold. If your slippers have sheep's wool in them, like ugg slippers, then they often sweat a lot or feel a little wet while simultaneously feeling cold at times, or warm enough. Most sweaters are also not designed to keep your armpits a little bit cooler so you stay evenly warm along your body.
If you want to wear gloves, then finger and hand mobility is effected, and usually with hands, it's the fingers that are cold anyway, making fingerless gloves not feel that useful.
While if the room is all one consistent warm enough temperature, you don't get these cold & hot spot effects.
Last December, Nevada County Ca, where I live, had a massive snow storm that knocked out power and snowed people in for 1-3 weeks. I wound up huddled in my apartment with 45 degree heat for five days or so. With enough sweaters, I was a comfortable temperature.
Aside from what you mention, since basically you providing your own heat for yourself, you have to put or take off layers depending on physical activity. And so naturally this process involves too-hot and too-cold periods that are less than pleasant. Still, I survived to tell the tale.
I mean, we could all live like the hero of To Build A Fire, at least until we died.
> we could all live like the hero of To Build A Fire
That (and 45 degrees) are strawperson arguments against turning down the thermostat a little and putting on a sweater (and let me recommend shoes). My sense is that many people generally (I don't know the parent commenter) shoot down any individual action, because it's individual action - it's reactionary, ridiculing any 'liberal' idea.
I'm actually pretty progressive and do sometimes leave my sweater on after taking walk and turn the thermostat down.
However I have a bunch of other "personal comfort issues", related to health. so often leave the heat at seventy while I deal with these.
But even more, I do think the "liberal spirit" of trying to solve or pretending you can solve social or environmental issues with exhortations to individual action is reactionary in the end. The only solution to global warming or pollution or etc is action by the state involving the regulation of private enterprises. These "if we all consumed less" positions are kind of the flip side of telling people who make minimum wage they're poor 'cause they drink a soda at lunch or have netflix etc.
Edit: TL;DR; Exploring what you're comfortable with is a good, even suggesting other explore this good. But the spirit of "the problem is you-all consumer too much" is problematic.
It's another strawperson argument. It's not all one or the other. Reducing your energy consumption is not sufficient, and I don't know anyone who says it is.
The idea that individuals are powerless is antithetical to democracy, which IMHO is why the reactionaries push it. They say the same thing about protests (despite a long history of success) and any other individual/collective action. Democratic government is a form of collective action, and so they decry that too. They want you dependent on strongpersons and corporations, and IMHO by buying into it, you are surrendering your power and (unwittingly for most) doing nothing less than fighting agaist freedom and democracy. Collective action is quite powerful - ironically, the reactionary movement uses it heavily, and is the foundation of a free society, as is individual responsibility. (It's also the foundation of a free market and SV-style entrepenurialism - individuals doing something in their garage and changing the world.)
Communities, society, depend on everyone doing their part as individuals. You can't prevent trash on the streets in your community by obstaining from littering yourself, but we do keep the streets clean in large part by each person not littering (and we also obey the law, help people in need, etc. etc.).
Reality is quite the opposite of reactionary propaganda: Individuals acting works incredibly well. The Minutemen in the American Revolution were volunteers, who defeated the subjects of the British King. After centuries of unprecendeted success in human history, it's incredible that people abandon it simply because of propaganda.
> I'm actually pretty progressive
I don't know you, of course, and it's just one comment in one moment in your life, but the parent comment is clearly anti-progressive.
But we all do consume too much for it to be sustainable. While I agree that we primarily need regulation, mostly on industries and the production of goods and services, our collective individual choices do matter. And I can’t credibly fight for regulations while driving a huge SUV or crisscrossing the world with jet planes.
Pretending these little moments do anything to help is not a liberal idea. It’s just as stupid as avoiding exercise and eating less to reduce your carbon dioxide output. It demonstrates a complete disconnect from the ability to contextualize real issues from things that actually help.
Stopping climate change is not a “liberal idea”, at least not in the mainstream liberal sense. Airplanes are still filled with liberals even quite far left on the spectrum in the US (even AOC flies all over the east coast because her time is “too important” to be disrupted by climate change).
Some do, but doing something stupid and patting yourself on the back is worse than doing nothing at all. At least someone who intentionally doesn’t do anything knows they aren’t doing something and might vote for real change.
In my experience, those that don't take any individual action rarely take any meaningful action on any other plane either. Either you get it and care, which means you do whatever little you can do yourself and work for changing the society, or you don't get it and you don't care.
Those that criticise individual action are most often the ones that can't bring themselves to sacrifice even the smallest pleasure or convenience, but still feel a small pang of guilt whenever they see other people doing their best to do their part.
One thing that's kind of silly about most of our shower stall designs is their open-top design. While a few are sold with caps most are not. Having a cap on top of the shower allows for lower ambient temperatures in the bathroom while showering in (relative) comfort. This also has the benefit of reducing condensation on the ceiling and walls of the bathroom.
Probably because moisture is a much bigger problem in homes than heat or cold. If the shower stall were closed on top, when the door was closed, the moisture would sit in the shower and not evaporate. That can lead to mold problems.
It's much easier to deal with moisture when it's largely restricted to the interior of the shower! Easy to wipe down the sides and then leave the door open to allow the remaining moisture to evaporate. Seems superior to having the water vapours condensing on ceilings and walls in the bathroom that likely can't be wiped down.
You can also just have a small shower room, with a separate door, it's about equivalent. You see this in many houses where the sink vs shower & toliet are two separate 'rooms' connected to each other.
After you do it if or a while, your definition of cold changes. First it was cold during the summer, now in the summer the water doesn't feel cold at all. For me to really feel cold water (after years of doing this), it has to be well before freezing outside and even then I can be standing under this water for minutes at a time.
I'm not personally advocating for this, but some argue for water conservation by taking a https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navy_shower which involves only about 2 minutes of time in the water.
>A Navy shower (also known as a "combat shower", "military shower", "sea shower", "staggered shower", or "G.I. bath") is a method of showering that allows for significant conservation of water and energy by turning off the flow of water in the middle portion of the shower while lathering.
Hold up - do you mean to tell me that people do not turn off the water while lathering? I've showered this way all my life, is this not the norm?
The controls to get back to your proper temperature after a shutoff are unreliable. What you need is a shutoff valve on the shower head itself, so the temperature stays the same, which is not common on many showers unless they are using the navy shower head too. It's mostly a UI issue.
I came up with this method a few years ago and have used it ever since. I’ve never looked back; I’m no less comfortable now than before, and I enjoy using less energy even though my hot water use is included in the rent.
I’ve had little luck converting friends and family to it, though.
Honestly in the time it'd take to turn it off and on I could basically finish 'lathering', I don't belabour it or find particular pleasure in prolonged showers.
I can understand it for people that like a long shower, maybe.. except that surely it's the water they enjoy rather than just the process, so being there with it off wouldn't be any fun?
Often with combi boilers, if you turn off the water it takes a solid 30s to a minute for the water to come up to temperature again, sometimes longer if you account for the water in the pipes and the thermostat reaching equilibrium.
Obviously newer/better boilers come up to temperature quicker but you don't always have the luxury of choosing your boiler.
It's not a question of economics, it's about not purposefully wasting resources.
Perhaps you'll be surprised to hear that I also turn off the lights in rooms that I am not in, or that I don't keep cars running when I'm not using them to move around.
Counter-question: why would you ever keep the water running when you're not utilizing the water?
Because when you turn the water off it's cold. I would rather pay 1.5 cents to remain warm while I lather. If the resource was actually scarce, it wouldn't cost so little to use it.
I think it’s a cultural and technical thing. But still, it’s weird hearing that people leave the water on and this “navy” shower isn’t the norm. Perks of growing up in a communist country, with constant outages.
I love these ideas both just for the joy of tinkering (which many on HN will understand), to experiment with saving resources, and to actually save a little:
In the summer I take cold and cool showers. It struck me that it's a bit insane to consume energy cooling my home, and then using hot water to heat myself up again. Just leave home a little warmer and the cool shower feels great - less AC, less water heating, and happier results.
Also, I took a trip to a poorer country where people, lacking plumbing, bathed using buckets and a big cup. I tried it and it worked fine[0] - almost no drawback at all, just a different habit. I need far less water to shower than I imagined and if I can, turn the water on and off as I shower. Unfortunately, it requires a shower control that is one lever that retains its heat setting; resetting the temperature every time is too cumbersome.
[0] To be clear, I am not at all implying that those people shouldn't have plumbing (they should) or that I was trying to experience poverty in any way (a ridiculous notion, considering where I came from and where I was returning to). I just saw that it worked fine and tried it.
I'd recommend the sauna as an alternative... I'm really interested in the homestead movement and one thing thats promoted is the rocket stove, I've often wondered how such a design might work out if you used it for cooking while using the residual heat for a hot "sauna" wall in the next room...
Most people in the warmer parts of Japan and China (not Hokkaido, not Heilongjiang) don’t use that much heating in the winter, I’ve gotten used to it and don’t really find it a problem.
I lived in Shanghai, which is too warm for snow in the winter. But it's still freezing cold; when I wasn't running heat (because I didn't know how), I'd wake up in the morning with my toes suffering from frostbite. I was miserable all the time until I obtained a space heater.
I've always found the best way to stay warm when sleeping, is to wear as little clothes as possible. My best guess is that heat escapes from our hands and feet so all the warm clothes causes this huge difference in temperature in our bodies.
Even here in -20 temps, I typically sleep in a t-shirt and shorts. Heat from my body warms up the little enclosed space under the blankets quite quickly and the overall temp is a lot more comfortable than being wrapped up in multiple layers that restrict movement.
A better set of blankets is potentially a solution to the narrow problem of my toes freezing while I'm asleep. It doesn't do anything for me while I'm awake.
Note that I was living in a school dormitory with bedding provided by the dorm, so it met a local standard of reasonableness.
The hero of To Build A Fire was obviously the sled dog, the human was too much whiny and needy - which is what caused the hero to abandon him in the end.
For the issue of "fingers are cold but gloves affect mobility", purchasing a pair of thumbhole arm warmers have made a world of difference for me
They're almost like fingerless gloves, but more comfortable and easier to manage.
You might be worried "but it's the fingers that are cold anyway, so fingerless gloves are not what I need." I thought that too, but trying them immediately proved me wrong and I never had an issue with cold fingers again. I'm fairly sure it's because warming your wrists/palms keep your blood from losing heat in those areas, so your fingers get much warmer circulation.
For something less than $10, it's probably the best purchase I've made for working in the winter
>For the issue of "fingers are cold but gloves affect mobility", purchasing a pair of thumbhole arm warmers have made a world of difference for me
this is calling back to the recent post on Dickensian poverty for me. Everyone not well to do in A Christmas Carol was cold and had layers on and fingerless gloves and stood around shivering. But the rich people were heating the spaces (except Scrooge of course)
Oh that's really cool and good to know. I can totally afford to heat my place, but it's like a challenge for myself to find a set of home clothing that would keep me comfortably warm despite it being a bit chilly inside.
Still need to solve the cold yet damp (from sweating?) feet and sweating armpit issue although.
As others had noticed, the cold hand / feet thing is mostly a computer thing for me. Also probably due to me restricting my eating at times.
I've found quality wool garments to be very helpful. Examples: A thick wool "cable knot" sweater is both warm and highly breathable, ideal for hiking. Wool socks (and/or wool felt slippers when it's very cold) keep feet warm without any of the clamminess (or smell) associated with cotton or synthetics. Merino wool underwear has similar benefits.
The price is higher compared to cotton or synthetics, but it's possible to find good values by shopping sales. The daily rewards of wool (in every season) are worth the extra effort.
When I'm active outside in the winter I always wear a thin layer of wool as the inner layer, medium thick wool socks and a wool sweater. Over that I use shell clothing like gore-tex jacket and pants. As long as I'm active I will not freeze even if temperatures reaches -20C. If I'm out and about, f.ex. a long ski trip, I will bring a down jacket in my backpack that I will wear over the shell jacket when pausing to eat. Our kids wear wool inner layer, fleece mid layer and a insulated shell "one-piece" when they are out in the snow. Mostly because they often just sit down to play. If they were active all the time mid layer wouldn't be necessary.
Also found that it's perfectly OK to wear thin wool inner layer all the time. It doesn't really get too warm as long as you don't wear warm clothes over.
> An issue with keeping yourself warm with clothing is some hotspots get too warm, and others too cold. Like the armpits usually get too warm, but your exposed hands too cold.
We can sit and imagine problems with every course of action, and never step forward.
In my life, I've never had the quoted problem and I've never heard anyone else say it's a problem. On my list of things to worry about, this ranks near the bottom. No clothing I know of has special cool spots, beyond outdoor recreation equipment (e.g., mountaineering gear with pit zips), yet somehow we all do fine. I expect our bodies adjust fine to such variations.
> While if the room is all one consistent warm enough temperature, you don't get these cold & hot spot effects.
That doesn't add up: No clothing (with the exception mentioned above) has such cooling spots. If our bodies couldn't adjust, a constant temperature would be the same, sweater or not.
EDIT:
> If your slippers have sheep's wool in them, like ugg slippers, then they often sweat a lot or feel a little wet while simultaneously feeling cold at times, or warm enough.
>We can sit and imagine problems with every course of action, and never step forward.
Well, you assume these are fake problems, and so the GP is being disingenuous.
The problems he mentions basically only happen if you stay at a computer, or such unphysical activities that form the basis of modern work.
As you properly notice, these problems are mostly nonexistent if you do "real" physical activities, but you can still suffer from them.
E.g. while doing inconsistent physical exercise in cold winters , your temperature will rise up a lot, so you may sweat a lot and then get cold fast again in your wet clothing.
Any construction worker knows this can be quite a hassle.
He then mention "cold hands". This is called "Raynaud syndrome", and affects 4% of people.
This is very difficult to deal with, especially if your primary work is typing at a computer.
There are many types of gloves you can buy: compression gloves, fishermen gloves, spandex ones, with 1 to 5 exposed fingers.
Each has particular downsides to deal with, none are perfect.
You can get silver-threaded clothing too, although that is quite expensive.
Managing good comfort while minimizing room-heating is not easy at all, and that does not even address other "house" issues (at an extreme, water-pipes exploding because of freezing water).
> The problems he mentions basically only happen if you stay at a computer ...
That is what most people I know do for a living, and often during personal time, including me - it's probably the most common job activity among HN readers. And what are we doing now to post these comments? And yet, I've never heard those complaints.
Also, I think you have things reversed: Active people are the ones who like to buy clothes with pit zips.
> your temperature will rise up a lot, so you may sweat a lot and then get cold fast again in your wet clothing
Tangentially: You can avoid this problem with the proper materials: Don't wear cotton in these situations - it is worse than nothing if damp; it chills you. Wear breathable materials that insulate when wet and dry quickly. Wool is probably best, and then 'fleece', which is effectively synthetic wool. Down (e.g., from geese) is even better but if it gets wet, it clumps up into useless balls; however, I've never seen it do that from perspiration, only from external water sources (rain, falling in a river, etc.). Synthetic down can be very warm and still insulates when wet; I suspect it's warmer per liter or per gram than wool, but I'm not sure.
Also, wear a wind-proof outer shell. Preventing the convection of wind does as much as anything to keep you warm.
> Managing good comfort while minimizing room-heating is not easy at all
In fact, it's very easy and people have been doing it for most of history: Put on a sweater. Are we really debating how hard that is? I mean, we can make anything hard, but ... wow.
>Put on a sweater. Are we really debating how hard that is?
You are either very disingenuous, or have trouble with reading comprehension. The point is, if your hands get cold easily it's not possible to go too low in temperature without discomfort. Of course while having sufficiently warm clothing to have a warm core, as you said earlier.
The 4% figure I mentioned is from the Wikipedia abstract; I haven't bothered to check the research, but I believe it grounds this firmly in the "common" territory instead of the "I never heard of such a thing in my life".
Yeah I am already wearing a sweater, warm pants, wool slippers with socks and a beanie / hat. The hands are unexposed and I'm thinking at this point I need a different slippers that are bit more breathable. Also staying warm with breathable fabrics can be somewhat deceptive, because your dehydrating yourself faster via sweat your not perceiving.
Wool doesn't work well for me due to skin issues unless I cover it with a layer of nylon / cotton. Yes I've tried good merino wool, and it's still minorly irritating. I've given up on most wool that touches my skin.
Also my apartment is in a fairly temperate place, and what is hot / cold is a bit weird. The floor is a fairly cold hardwood floor, and I think it sucks a lot of heat out somehow. I'm not in a place that is consistently cold, it's only cold for like 4 months, so places here are not very well designed for it. It's also not carpet which probably solves a lot of the cold floor problems via it's built in insulation.
Also I'm more perceptive about my body state than probably most people and try to avoid wearing antiperspirant when I know I'm not going out that day with WFH. Your are probably blocking a lot of the sweating your armpits would do in this modern age as a result, and I believe we should making clothing that keeps that area a little bit more cool.
My internal body temperature can run hotter if I start eating a lot of carbs and more calories, but then I start consistently gaining weight so I don't do that.
I'm also more doing this as a challenge, I can definitely afford to just heat my room to t-shirt levels and put rugs everywhere, but I'm trying to figure out clothing that would work well without it while using a computer for hours. I'm not raynauds level of issues, but it makes sense this is mostly an computer worker issue too.
> In my life, [...] I've never heard anyone else say it's a problem. [...] yet somehow we all do fine. I expect our bodies adjust fine to such variations.
Take the commentor you replied to and myself as people with this problem. Its not for not trying - growing up counting pennies, not in poverty but money was tight, lead to a layers based heating mentality. One of the greatest benefits of the extra wealth afforded to the software career is to heat the space I'm in.
On the flip side I'm also sensitive to hot spaces - I keep my house in the 16-19 celcius range during the day, and colder at night.
> In my life, I've never had the quoted problem and I've never heard anyone else say it's a problem.
I have the quoted problem. Sitting working at the computer at home. Armpits especially. Groin can be similar.
Think about the problem. In a proper typing position with elbows by your side, the part of your upper body where flesh touches flesh is the side of your chest and your upper arm. It's no wonder the armpits are warmer than elsewhere.
I ameliorate the armpits by using a gilet over thinner layers. It keeps my core warm, but does nothing for poor circulation in my hands. And I find even the thinnest gloves slow my typing.
> Do you wear gloves indoors? If not, aren't your hands colder?
No and no. The temperature in my home is set just warm enough that a sweater (and let me add, shoes - insulation from the coldest air and surface in the room) keeps me comfortable. My hands don't get chilled at that temperature.
FWIW - from wilderness experience - it is widely believed that the best way to warm your hands is often to warm your core. Your body naturally prioritizes your core (probably better to keep your heart at 37 C and let your hands get a little chilly than vice versa!); keep that warm enough and energy/blood will be diverted to keeping your extremities warm.
I wear fingerless compression gloves when coding. They are usually sold for arthritis/carpel tunnel/raynauds. If you get cold fingers these might be life-changing for you as they were for me.
Another factor is just getting up and doing some light exercise every 30 mins or so. 5 push ups, or jogging up and down the stairs a few times, is enough to keep your circulation reasonably balanced.
I tend to be cheap, not even just frugal, but it's worth it to me. During my first winter in my own place, I set the thermostat to the low 60s F to save money. After about two weeks I concluded that feeling perpetually uncomfortable in my own place wasn't worth whatever money I was saving. It felt like trying not to drink water when thirsty to save money. Warmth is just such a basic human need. Better to save in a number of other ways. I definitely wouldn't do this to my wife and kids now.
> Yeah, but is that sort of discomfort worth the energy usage of heating the entire room?
For the average HN reader in north america? Probably not. For the median person in europe right now? Maybe not (thanks to what's happening in ukraine affecting gas prices).
I worked in an ice cream factory for a bit, was hard to find socks/shoes that would keep you warm not sweat/freeze. That job was wild like nostrils frozen, break every 45 mins.
I think you can help your body regulate the temperature and even sweat.
There's the old saying: "cold feet? wear a hat."
dress with the right layers. I always put a layer of synthetic beneath cotton.
Nice socks help your body deal with cold quite dramatically. "Darn Tough" brand merino wool socks are pretty exceptional socks that keep your feet warm and (importantly) dry.
Are there any good fingerless gloves for typing? I'd like to give them a shot, cold hands are usually what causes me to turn the heat on and I try to use as little heat as I can.
i haven't done extensive research so there could be thinner gloves out there, but i bought a pair of "edz merino fingerless gloves" a few months ago and they are less restrictive than the pair i had before
still end up with cold-ish fingers though which feels similar enough to cold hands. im thinking what i need is something like mittens but instead of something that wraps around your fingers, it would just rest on top and keep the air off while your fingers are free to move underneath
You could try some fingerless “glove liners” (might find some at REI), but I’d suggest “arm socks”. They come in two basic styles; somewhat feminine knits, and synthetics made for sporting activities or hunting.
I've been thinking about the inverse problem. I live in a very warm city. Air conditioning (cooling spaces) is the norm, but tons of money are spent with installations, maintenance and the monthly electricity bill. The new houses are designed with zero consideration about ventilation, designers seem to take for granted that you are going to buy an AC system. Oftentimes, a very simple change in the project would be enough to improve ventilation, but apparently they just don't think about it.
Some months ago I moved into an apartment with good ventilation and started to do some simple experiments directing the air flow and staying in places where it's more concentrated and the wind is slightly faster, improving the heat remotion. I use, at most, a fan, and didn't feel the need for an air conditioner so far.
I wonder how much energy we could be saving. I'd love to find an article as thorough as this one but about air cooling.
I would disagree with new houses not considering ventilation. There are set building standards (ASHRAE 62.1, 62.2, and ISO standards) that have been around for a while that specify how ventilated spaces should be for given use cases. There’s a more recent trend to evolve these standards to take into consideration non-hazardous levels of particulate matter and gases that still show cognitive impairment—-I’m currently exploring this topic area for my PhD work.
What we’re seeing, though, are tighter building envelopes so that the structure is thermally efficient. However, with a tighter envelope, active/natural ventilation systems becomes even more important than in older structures where there is some rate of natural air exchange with the exterior through building cracks and terrible (by todays standards) windows.
There are companies coming up that are looking at “Personal Comfort Systems” and there is a fair amount of active research in this area (ex., https://cbe.berkeley.edu/research/personal-comfort-system/). It’s an interesting space since you have essentially two knobs to play with: (1) a persons actual heat exchange with the environment and (2) a persons perceived heat exchange.
Modern building codes do carefully consider ventilation, but I think a lot of knowledge and tradecraft have been lost.
If you're lucky and live in an older house of the correct design from just before A/C, (most of the oldest two-story single family homes in Berkeley, FWIW) you might notice that some of the internal walls stay well below room temperature during the summer.
The buildings typically have pier and beam foundations, and the cooling walls have passive draft ways that pull cool air over the ground under the house and up against those walls. This is great in the summer, but not so much in the winter. I don't know how they use convection to pull cold air up, or how they prevent moldy foundation dirt air from permeating the house. I've heard there are some pretty clever designs, but (of course) they're hidden behind walls.
Anyway, our modern house is one story, and has an intentionally-uninsulated concrete slab on grade foundation, so we get a similar effect. (Passive solar heat keeps it toasty in the winter.)
We usually have our windows open, but we also over-insulated the walls (for noise and efficiency), and have a tight building envelope, so the heating/cooling bill is tiny.
(Edit: I bet they vented the walls into the attic and under the floor. That'd create a strong updraft in the summer (out the attic vents), but (if the attic is well insulated against the rest of the house) not in the winter.
I had family members who lived in a home in the deep south that was built before air conditioning was common. It had a large fan in the ceiling of a central hallway that vented the air from the inside the house out through the attic. This was an industrial grade fan that moved a huge volume of air.
At bedtime, they could open the bedroom windows and turn on the fan and a stiff wind would blow in through all the bedroom windows in the house.
That fan, along with window awnings and tall ceilings, really made a difference in how often they needed to use air conditioning, even near the Gulf of Mexico.
We had a whole-house fan like this in Sacramento. It worked especially well there because (1) it was not humid, and (2) the temperature at night was much lower than in the daytime. It might be 100° during the day, but it would be in the 60s at night.
Fans like this aren't nearly as effective if either of these conditions is not met — then you're just pulling in air that is somewhat less uncomfortable each night, instead of getting truly refreshed.
As mentioned, this was right on the Gulf of Mexico where it was both very hot in the day and very humid all the time.
In the early summer, the temperature dropped from the upper 90's in the day to the low 70s at night. In the worst of the summer, the temperatures were only dropping to the 80's, and they did use the air conditioners then.
However, that fan moved so much air that there would be a stiff wind blowing across the beds all night, and that cool humid wind would have you under the blankets in no time.
I.have one in my house, it is going to be removed in the near future. It works good some days, but modern ac is still better. When we use the ac it lets hot air from the attic in, and worse all winter it is letting cold air from the attic in. The thing can really be insulated.
There is a lot about this house that needs to be updated to modern energy standards and getting rid of that fan is on the list. Overall it costs far more than it saves.
>When we use the ac it lets hot air from the attic in, and worse all winter it is letting cold air from the attic in.
The one in my relative's house had louvers that would open when you turned the fan on and then close when you turned it off, so it sealed itself off when not in use.
They saved a fortune by not having to run the ac all summer.
Those louvers don't seal very well at best, and even sealed they have no r value so they are not very useful. They can save ac in summer, but IMO not enough
I installed a whole-house fan in our place in San Jose. That plus ceiling fans in each bedroom meant we could go all year without A/C. This was the Bay Area though.
I had remembered whole-house fans when growing up in Kansas — many of my friends had homes with them. They could be noisy but really did make for a nice house breeze in the evening.
GP and GGP are describing different methods of cooling:
Sitting in a breeze does two things: 1) Allows your sweat to evaporate more quickly, and that evaporation is what causes most of the cooling effect. It's not very effective in high humidity because your sweat won't evaporate very easily. Evaporative coolers / swamp coolers work off this same principle. 2) Sitting in the still indoor air your body heat warms the air around yourself and you end up sitting in that pocket of heat. Just about any airflow stops that, which is why air circulators (fans that are meant to point from one end of a room to another instead of directly on a person) work to make a room feel a bit cooler.
Running the attic fan at night with open windows can have similar effects as above (especially the air circulator), but on top of that it's for pulling in the air from outdoors after it's cooled off at night, and expelling the warmed-up air that accumulates near the ceilings and roof. You'd want to close windows in the morning so the warmed-up air doesn't get pulled in and replace all the cooler air.
Fans don't improve comfort as much if humidity is high, because the airflow doesn't cause as much evaporative cooling on the skin. So you need a temperature gradient to get a good effect. Attic fans are a good example. The attic tends to get hotter than the outside air when the sun is shining, and the fan helps equalize.
And instead of cubicles, perhaps we could have insulated ice baths like athletes use after games. You sit down in there and pull a tray over the bath with your keyboard, mouse and monitor. You can soak your hands to keep the inflammation down from the repetitive stress too.
The energy savings from spot cooling with fans can be incredible compared to AC. A garage AC unit consumes ~1300W while a 20” fan consumes about ~150W.
My startup, Following Fan, has built a person-tracking 20” fan that uses computer vision to automatically stay pointed at the user as they move around. This technology provides the location agnostic benefits of AC with the energy consumption of fans.
You’re right that fans don’t affect humidity and are less effective in extreme heat.
However, there are many places such as garages, airplane hangers, and large warehouses where AC is impractical due to a lack of insulation and the need to open large doors to move vehicles or goods in and out.
In those environments, fans are about the best cooling solution you can get. One big issue with traditional fans though is that they just point in an single direction or oscillate back and forth regardless of the location of the user.
Yeah, this is a big one for people in humid climates.
Here, it doesn't get that cold in the winter, but the house gets absolutely balmy and gross feeling. I have to turn the AC on just to get some humidity out of the air, despite it being in the 60s or 70s.
I have a dehumidifier also, but it can't do the job alone. It's really weird seeing how much water it sucks out of the air.
I live in an old shotgun double in New Orleans. A lot of the features designed for airflow have been fucked up by “modernization” - most of the windows are permanantly closed due to window AC units, transom windows above the doors between rooms are painted shut with the hinge support stuff gone, etc - but it’s still really amazing how much colder it is than the outside. It is designed to shed heat in a ton of ways and it’s so much better at it than the newer house in the same city I grew up in.
Just curious, what part of the world do you live in?
I've lived in cities where we experience anything between below zero to 120F throughout the year. I couldn't imagine not having AC/Heating in those areas even with more efficient ventilation/insulation.
I live in Fortaleza, Brazil. Temperatures here are very stable along the whole year (78F - 90F, it rarely falls out of this interval).
I'm not advocating this no-AC model as a general solution though. I'm aware we're a bit lucky here. I used to live in Sao Paulo and temperatures vary more wildly there, sometimes within a single day.
Any temperate area on the planet will easily have 90-100 degree swings throughout the year. I used to live on the US East Coast and a summer high of 90-95 and winter lows of 0-5 were common my entire childhood. I moved to the midwest in the early summer and it hit 100 more than once, and it's been below 0 multiple times this winter already.
Yes, we get used to it, not unpleasant for me, at all.
But it changes the way you live. Compared with lives of friends from Europe, I notice that theirs has a bit more of a "structure" and predictability. E.g., hang out more in the summer, doing more reading and writing more in the winter.
I think I would enjoy that. Of course I could plan my life based in months instead of seasons, but it's not the same, especially considering that people around me wouldn't be following that same plan.
Consistent year-round temperatures is something I thought I'd want right up until I experienced it for a while. Turns out I like having the variety of seasons. I love snow, but not all year. I love the leaves falling, but not all year. I love Spring thunderstorms, but not all year. I even love 110F heat waves, but I'm glad when Fall arrives :).
I grew up in the Midwest and lived in SF and LA for a few years each. I definitely missed the seasons changing and appreciated them even more moving back to the Midwest. Lack of seasons really messed with my sense of time, like: "Oh that thing we did last month...oh woah that was six months ago??"
> The new houses are designed with zero consideration about ventilation, designers seem to take for granted that you are going to buy an AC system.
These are two separate problems.
In the ideal situation, you generally want the house to be fairly air tight and condition the air for (a) temperature and (b) humidity. Each of (a) and (b) are taken care of by different mechanical units: one is monitored by a thermometer and the other by an hygrometer. The latter triggers a stand alone dehumidifier:
For fresh air you have an HRV/ERV, which brings outside air (through a filter) into the house (usually to bedrooms), while at the same time blowing out stale inside air (usually taken from bathrooms and the kitchen), with the two moving through the unit so that the outgoing air tempers the incoming air:
This is exactly the problem with newer design and construction philosophy. Its premise is that we will use mechanical systems, and then try to make these mechanical systems more efficient such as improving insulation, using multi-stage condensers for the AC, etc. This is epitomized in the passive house concept.
In contrast the older philosophy is that natural ventilation is good enough, so we design houses to improve that, such as strategic placement of windows to allow cross ventilation, use high ceilings to allow heat to rise, etc.
The original article is squarely in the second camp.
> In contrast the older philosophy is that natural ventilation is good enough, so we design houses to improve that, such as strategic placement of windows to allow cross ventilation, use high ceilings to allow heat to rise, etc.
Yeah, and all those open windows bring in pollen and dust. Yay! Hope you have a good bug screen as well.
Of course if there's high humidity then all than ventilation may not help because the air is already saturated so your sweat doesn't evaporate so you're not cooled.
Natural ventilation could be great if the conditions outside are exactly what you want them inside as well. But if the outside is too hot or too cold or too humid then what are you going to do then?
Modern (post energy crisis) houses have 10-100x higher indoor air pollution than the outdoor air. CO2 concentration is also an issue.
Older houses didn't have those issues, but energy consumption and humidity regulation were nightmares.
Removing drafts created and solved many difficult engineering problems.
I think having a tightly sealed house with lots of openable windows is a good solution.
Most days, you can hopefully leave the windows open during the day and/or night. On smoky/hot/cold days you can run filters and ac/heat.
In some countries, it's common to open all the windows for 15-30 minutes, even on really cold/hot days. There's basically no thermal mass in the air (vs. the contents of the house), so it uses much less energy than you'd expect, and the house returns to temperature quickly. However, it greatly reduces indoor air pollution (by roughly an order of magnitude), including dust and pollen.
You could get a similar effect with an air exchanger, especially in Alaska, like in your link.
However, those don't usually do much to help with humidity entering/exiting the house, which is the main drawback of opening the windows for 15 minutes.
2000W sounds like a small amount of energy until you realize modern heat pumps have coefficients of power between 5 and 10. So, that house could leak 10-20KW of energy on average, and still meet the 2000 watt goal. (Assuming they installed a heat pump, which they should have before paying for ultra high end insulation.)
Leaving windows open is not the preferred option for most of the year (though I grew up in a house with A/C, and only first experienced an abode with in in my 20s).
Further, more places are getting bouts of extreme weather:
My personal preference is deeply in the natural ventilation camp, and the typically delicious air we have in the Bay Area is a boon to my wellness. I leave the windows mostly open 24/7 three seasons, and in the winter I partially open them during significant portions of the day. It’s wonderful.
But during the worsening wildfires seasons, I must tightly seal and air purify my apartment for weeks straight, and had to buy an air conditioner that I run during the day. The stale air is unpleasant, but unavoidable.
How idiosyncratic are my preferences and environmental circumstances? Are any architects working on house designs for me?
I think a passive house design would be excellent for you.
Highly insulated, air tight (but vapor permeable) building envelope. Constant intake of fresh air to bedrooms living rooms, filtered and passed through a heat exchanger to heat or cool it with air exhausted from kitchen and bathrooms.
They generally cost about ~25% more than a standard code-built house (unless you want a lot of windows), but cost much less to heat and cool. They're also more comfortable and have less pollen, dust, and even insects.
I think your preferences make total sense. Though I have little experience with wildfires. Would an air filter help?
For my own eccentricities, I have the bedroom window open slightly while sleeping, closed when awake.
During the winter, when inside I wrap up in warm clothes, thermals, scarf. When exercising outside I wear only one or two layers. I call it the 'Winter Paradox'.
I live in a mid density city with a nice ambient hum. Indeed the neighbors in my building are respectful, as are the neighbors on either side. But I think the ambient hum is key to the peaceful atmosphere, when living in a city. The biggest threat we’ve experienced in terms of noise is blue jays that I finally staved off after months, by occasionally assaulting them with a super soaker. Other birdsong is pleasant, I hear some right now and open the window wider.
I say this as somebody fairly particular about my comfort. I can’t stand interior transformer hums for example.
Indeed. Speaking about hot and sunny cities like mine, besides strategic placement of windows I would also mention barriers to direct sunlight over the walls. Simple barriers can improve inner temperatures sensibily and costs no energy, but most projects don't take that in consideration.
Jesus, here there are even buildings importing those "glass wall" concepts, which makes total sense in climates like European's and north American's, but makes absolutely no sense in sunny cities -- you just end up aggravating the greenhouse effect and having to rely more heavily on AC. Everything because of façade aesthetics.
It doesn’t even make sense in North America - the glass walls make it very unpleasant in summer, even in heavily air conditioned buildings, even in moderate climates (California). It’s like working out next to a space heater, with an AC unit blowing on your neck.
I've learned a lot about US climates and their notion of ventilation, here at the comments I got.
I hope you guys also have found interesting that, in some other parts of the globe, ventilation and air cooling are two very interconnected concepts. And also that, in climates like ours, relying solely on AC while not taking advantage of the cooling properties of moving air masses means waste of energy.
Most of western Europe (the part most in Europe reading this are from ) have mild climates compared to the US. Of course the US is a large country, and so there are more climates in discussion. What works well in Europe often doesn't in the US.
Of course one size fits all codes don't help. What works well in Europe will work someplace in the US, just not everywhere
Uhm.. for me it helps, and A LOT. Surely there are more factors involved, which I'm not aware of. I'm talking from Fortaleza, Brazil. Maybe the sea is bringing cooler air. I really don't know, I only have these pieces of empirical knowledge and my experience is very narrow, basically limited to this city.
A large body of water near by certainly has a moderating effect on temperature.
I looked up the climate data for Fortaleza, and compared it to my town (random US city, about 35 degrees northern latitude, so not super far south or anything.)
Our average daily highs in summer are only about 1 degree (C) lower than your RECORD highs... your averages are about 9C lower than ours.
Without AC here it would be...supremely unpleasant, and well other the threshold of danger for anyone with any sort of medical issues.
It can, though has limits to how hot/wet it can help with - see figure [0] for Celcius and [1] for Farenheit which show the accepted climate-science approach mapping appropriate techniques for achieving comfort at various temperatures/humidity.
Ventilation is actually best for hot-wet climates where hot-dry climates (common through much of the US) are usually better dealt with through thermal-mass/thermal-lag as typically the nights are cold (in hot-wet usually the nights are hot).
This depends on the climate zone you’re in. In drier climates, some HVAC systems are actually humidifiers which blow the outside dry/hot air through a wet membrane (ex., desiccant) and blow out wetter/cold air.
IMO the real solution is building materials with high heat mass (e.g. stone), and architectural designs which allow for passive cooling. This exists already, but can be expensive to build.
An alternative is heating panels that emit long IR. These allow you to maintain a lower air temperature and still be comfortable when they're shining on you.
How even is that warming you get from them? I find it very uncomfortable to sit outside at a restaurant where they have heaters. One side gets roasted and the other is cold.
The same way the sun warms you when you walk out of the shade. Air temperature is the same but you feel warmer. Long IR is completely different than conventional heating elements that can only heat air.
Ventilation is so underrated. There is not only the obvious benefit in reducing electricity usage, but it helps with noise (AC doesn’t run as often), dust (free flowing air keeps it from collecting in air-flow deadzones), mildew (as with dust, air flow keeps moisture and humidity from concentrating in one spot), and the longevity of your appliances (cumulative effect of all of the above).
In Europe still today AC usage is at less than 5% of all households. Sure the US likely has more cities in really hot places, but ACs are still generally an American thing
Desertification in that area is starting to roll that back though. Never-irrigated ranches are drying up. Without argiculture, the towns die. The ecosystems don't recover, even in places where the people are gone and the buildings have rotted to dust and blown away (too hot / no rain).
This must have been how people felt when the Sahara turned into a desert. I can't believe it's happening so fast. (Towns that were populated 20 years ago are completely invisible now.)
Ventilation and air conditioning are two very different things. Unless it’s a central unit, the AC will be reusing the same air. In order to not die of lack of oxygen you need ventilation as well.
Interestingly, the articles I find about ventilation are indeed concerned about air quality. However, in my country, at least in the cities I've lived on, the idea of ventilation is mostly associated to cooling indoors (with air quality being a desirable byproduct). Maybe the differences between our climates led to differences between the concepts behind the same word. Or maybe there's a better word in English to express what I'm intending to (sorry, English is not my mother language).
I think you can only separate them in radiative systems. But otherwise, a modern commercial HVAC system has a degree of mixing the air from the outside world to reduce gas and particulate concentrations. So in some systems, the HVAC is the ventilation system but when only ventilating, the flow rate is stepped down and the conditioning system is inactive.
Heat properly insulated spaces. I don’t want to walk around with piles of movement limiting and suffocating clothing inside my own living room. The problem is not what you heat up, it’s how well you insulate it from losing its heat. In Australia where I live, insulation is non-existent in the average home/apartment. Even simple things like tinted windows (for hot days), double pane windows and floating floor is missing. On the top of that, you have archaic HVAC systems that cool and heat from one vent and have useless thermostat feedback loops. A $30 hand rolled thermostats I put together for my fairly expensive apartment unit is infinitely superior to what came with the unit.
This times 1000. The reason that central heating systems are so popular is because they are a million times better (from the human's perspective, not necessarily the environment's) than old "point heating" systems.
Last year when the electrical grid in Texas failed, we could heat ourselves by our gas fireplace, but our central heating was out. It was fucking miserable. Similar to what the article pointed out, basically any part of my body was either too hot or too cold, so I was constantly turning like a spit roaster trying to keep a "nice even bake" on all sides.
The solution to poor energy efficiency of heating is not for us to all invest in hooded chairs, it's to ensure homes are appropriately insulated.
I also think that drastically lowering the temperature in unmodified buildings will create other problems like mold because you move the dew point so the moisture generated by residents will condensate in problematic places, e.g. inside insulation.
> I don’t want to walk around with piles of movement limiting and suffocating clothing inside my own living room.
That is a strawperson - People wear a sweater all the time - they are pretty popular, believe it or not - without wearing "piles", having their movement limited, or even suffocating. If you find yourself suffocating when wearing sweaters, see a doctor!
Holy cow, the burden of wearing a sweater is just incredible in some of these comments!
I suffer from hyperventilation syndrome and anything that brings my attention to my breathing (including wearing a mask) sets it off. I feel suffocated wearing a mask. I can get out of breath, have tachycardia, dizziness, chest pain if I wear it for a long time. And yet I wear my mask everywhere I'm asked to.
There is a big difference between feeling suffocated in your own home where no one else is involved vs. among people you could potentially be putting at risk.
Doesn't seem like your opinion on sweaters makes for generally applicable advice, given your health condition.
Prefacing every bit of advice with, but if you have a serious medical condition then please modify this advice to suit, will get pretty tedious after a while.
In general, many people could stand to lower their thermostats in cold climates by 2⁰ or so by wearing appropriate clothing.
I realize reading this comment that I should not have responded to your other comment either.
This is so uninformed and rude that it feels like low-effort bait. Which worked like that given how many replies it got.
I'm in UK (south east). I work in tech, working from home. I very rarely put the heating on. The best part of not putting the heating on is that I've had my garden doors open almost every day through the winter. I mostly work at my laptop, just inside sitting on a comfy sofa, right next to the outdoors.
In December I was mostly opening the doors about midday just for the afternoon, but since mid to late January I'm back to opening the doors mostly from about 9 in the morning again, right through to the end of the working day.
To do this and remain comfortable I have to put on extra layers. When I go out the extra layers come off.
Weirdly, this is the first winter in a long time I've not really felt cold at all. I think it's because previous winters I've been working in an office heated to 20C+, and this year I've acclimatised slowly from the summer.
When I have put the heating on, I get hot real quick unless I start taking layers off, and actually it's easier to turn the heating off.
I stopped heating out of necessity when I was a poor student and made the same discovery. It's funny how when you go outdoors with other people they are freezing and you feel super comfy. I seriously think that about 3/4 of Europeans could get by without any heating for about 3/4 of winter time. Well, as long as the gulf stream holds up anyways.
> I seriously think that about 3/4 of Europeans could get by without any heating for about 3/4 of winter time.
The temperatures in UK are stable during the day due to sea climate. In Central Europe we get +/- 10 degrees during the day. This is completely different story from temperature comfort/security perspective. That's why we overinsulate and overheat our houses and why we tend to have higher temperatures inside then Brits.
My Italian friend laughed that he immediately recognized Poles in Italy because in August they had blanklets and sweaters at hand. We just always expect temperatures to drop suddenly by 10 degrees.
Even on British Airways planes temperatures are lower then on other airlines...
In continental Europe (Germany, specifically is where I have experience), most apartments are so well insulated that they don't even get significantly cold without the heat on. I often travel in winter, and have come back home, say, mid-February after a month away, and my apartments have never been lower than 15º C (about 60º F) inside. (Admittedly, it'd be colder if everyone in the building had their heat off.) That's very easy to deal with with no heating. Though, like most schmucks, I do use my heating to get it up to more normal inside temperatures.
Yes, I have heating in every room in my apartment in Berlin. But I only use the one in my living room. I never heat my two bed rooms or the bathroom. The rest of the apartment is a bit cooler but stays warm thanks to the neighbors below me heating their apartment. I actually prefer sleeping in a cold bed room so I never use the heating in there. I just toss on an extra blanket when it gets really cold outside. I generally have the window open there throughout the year. Even when it gets well below freezing temperatures.
Nothing worse than a stuffy warm room for sleeping for me. It's one of my annoyances with hotels actually. I hate it when I can't open the window. Generally the first thing I do is remove most of the blankets, turn of whatever heating is there, and if possible open the windows. For me the ultimate in stupidity is a hotel room with the AC on where people use blankets to stay warm where you can't even open the windows.
It's not like I have a choice here. Besides, the building charges an aggregate heating cost per year that I can't really influence with my behavior other than not turning on the heat when I don't need it. With my downstairs neighbors, I end up having to open the window as well to get the temperature in my bedroom to reasonably low levels.
Man, I have a similar problem whenever I visit my parents: my mother is after a heart attack, her blood flow is impaired so she's always cold, even when there's like 27 Celsius degrees in the room. The first thing I do when I the house is to shut down the heater in my bedroom. The whole house feels like a sauna.
With a sufficiently insulated apartment, you actually stay at reasonable temperatures from other sources of heat: bodies, bathing, appliances, cooking, computers, etc. A normal apartment uses a couple kilowatts of power, which generates as much heat as a couple space heaters running all the time.
Of course having more effective insulation is a good thing, but that's not the case we're talking about here: were talking about "staying at reasonable temperatures" thanks to your neighbors.
If everyone is content with a lower temperature, they still end up heating less, and energy is haved. (Also, they are probably transferring much more heat from their own single heated room than from neighbors through walls).
I spend couple of days/nights each week in my cabin. It is poorly isulated so when the stove goes cold the temperature drops quickly. It could be 15C (59F) after few hours and 4C-6C (39F-43F) in the morning. On the other hand it is small cabin and with a stove I can get to 30C (86F) in 15-30 minutes.
I have read the article couple of years ago and I do not burn stove all the time, just put a sweater on or turn on electric blanket.
Frankly I have got used to 'cold' and it just doesn't bother me anymore. I sleep much better when it is cold inside the cabin but warm in my bed with electric blanket (20W). As long as the temperature doesn't drop below 12C (54F) working on a laptop or reading with a sweater on is comfortable. I do not enjoy excesively heated living rooms in the city.
The other article on lowtech magazine mentions that the average temperatures in our houses have been raised over last couple of years significantly (due to better insulation, heating etc). I do remember that when I was teenager no one had been sitting in a living room with a t-shirt on but rather in a sweater as in winter the normal temepratures in a living room used to be 18-20C and in the sleeping room 16C. Nowadays it is more like 24-26C for most people I know.
It took me a bit of pondering the duotone design, when it hit me. "Hey it's that solar-powered website!"
Really cool to see the article, thank you. The leather hooded chair in particular caught my eye, what a find.
Reading one of the follow-on articles I appreciated the idea about opening the windows for hopefully-improved air quality being more of a doable thing with localized heat, since the air is not the primary heat transfer medium anyway.[1]
Our body NEED infrared light. (real doctor research with scientific evidence)
An interesting recent discovery is that our body need infrared radiation to function properly, not just UV light/vitamin D.
I think that people living in the northern climate discovered/felt that it was better to be exposed to the radian heat of the fire in the winter. We recently (50-100) years have been getting rid of fireplaces and replaced with forced air and baseboard heater that probably generated a lot of health problem.
A month ago I discovered this information, bought an small infrared heated and healed in 10 days the winter eczema I have been fighting for 25 years.
They talked about far infrared, I didn’t get the special lamp with the proper spectrum knowing that with a red hot coils I would get a continuous spectrum.
There is a bit of visible red light too, I didn’t study the detail closely, it was a cheap/fast test and it worked for me.
I would guess that the best thing is the sun light, we don’t know what we don’t know.
We take the general concept of heating people, not the space, to heart for our outdoor swimming pool. While most other folks heat their pool, we go ahead and swim in the cold water... but we buy everyone in the family a wetsuit. A few hundred dollars on wetsuits each year is far better than many hundreds on propane every month.
Totally - in some ways, it is more enjoyable. Easy to stay warm, and the suit give you some extra floatation, so we can play games in the deep water more easily. It also protects us more from sunburn, which is a nice added bonus.
In many places, even on a warm summer day the pool may be uncomfortably cold. Lots of thermal inertia, and if it's shaded at all it may not get enough solar energy to warm up. Without a heater the swimming season can be very short indeed.
Also, it's pretty darn awesome to fire up the pool once a year in the winter, like for Christmas, and host a swimming-in-the-snow party. Wouldn't want to keep it heated, but for a couple days it's not too bad.
Swimming in a hot spring or heated pool while it's snowing outside is really, really nice. If you haven't tried it, you should. That being said, I would never do that with my own pool because it would be far too expensive and the not great for the environment.
We have very very very good insulation now. We don't really need to stop heating spaces, we need to prevent heat loss. In addition we could use more modern heating systems which actually heat rooms only when needed.
Eh, depends on where you live. I was surprised, for example, to find out the abysmal state of insulation in New Zealand. Only in the last five decades have Kiwis had decent insulation standards -- for new construction. Homes from before that time often remain without adequate insulation -- and it gets cold throughout much of New Zealand!
Many new Japanese homes are uninsulated, with the residents using "heat the person" techniques like a kotatsu to keep warm.
Japan also had a history of homes with permanent passive air circulation; old Japanese buildings are often not much better than sleeping outside. That plus sitting-on-the-floor lends itself to a kotatsu culture. But different cultures work differently, and as a result the same solutions don't fit other places.
There are probably a bunch of different solutions that we just need to make it a little easier for local people (& contractors) to try out.
Also what I have heard from media is that the parts of the country that actually get cold with lot of snow for longer periods in winter do have all of the modern insulation and so on.
My daughter just told me the other day she wanted to try to make a Kotatsu. I had no idea what that was. I see the article mentions them!
Looked them up, priced them on Amazon (for a good looking one? ouch!), and then decided I will build my own version of one this year before next winter comes (I like woodworking).
I've spent a lot of time in very old houses with limited to no modern heating, and I've never experienced this. The biggest indicator for mold is moisture trapped between walls (including animals getting stuck in walls and dying). But that's a water and humidity thing, not an ambient temperature thing.
I think some very old houses don't have mold issues because they aren't tight enough. You get so much airflow through the walls, they don't really get damp.
Source: lived in a ~100 year old house in the Midwest for 15 years or so. The only place we got mold that I remember was inside the air conditioning unit.
You need a certain amount of wet for mold and mildew. Push the levers too far and you just end up with termites, or a failed foundation, and the whole thing gets replaced with something new.
The houses that have beaten their nemesis, water, are the ones most of us are willing to walk into more than twice.
Reminds me of when my mother had her kitchen renovated. When they removed the lathe & plaster, you could see the road clearly, right through all the slats. From outside they look tight, but they are anything but.
Depends on the construction. I bet Victorian brick and timber houses would be fine, since they're well ventilated throughout the structure, and were not intended to be intensively heated.
I grew up in a house like that and we had an unusable moldy basement because it was supposed to house the kitchen with a range that was burning most of the day. But of course basements are naturally damp, while above ground is not.
Cold spots in a heated house and a lack of airflow seem to cause mold. The temperature difference causing condensation, excess moisture with nowhere to go and then mold.
Interesting whether this would happen in an entirely unheated building.
I suppose it depends if there is some types of poorly placed barriers. In structures that can breath readily and in climates where they can dry it is less of an issue. On other hand those also need to in general be protected from water in structures.
A lot of that is due to structures not having a proper vapor barrier, therefor allowing vapor exchange from the outside world which decreases in-wall condensation.
Moist air from cooking increases the humidity in the house. The walls of the house are cold, the moisture condenses on the cold walls keeping them damp for the entire winter.
In areas with coastal fog it can be the case that the cooler months with lower evaporation rates are more likely to allow spores a foothold. This is often seen in older spaces designed with passively vented kitchen and baths.
But good building design following current standards isn't going to be affected by this.
Life has had half a billion years to figure out that if you produce offspring at the optimal (min-maxed, really) survival time, you get more offspring.
It's not just that spores work better in certain weather conditions, it's also that there are often more spores in those conditions as well. Mushrooms coming up after a rain, gambling that there will be another one in a couple days, for instance.
Depends if you live in a climate where just regulating humidity is enough to guarantee thermal comfort, something that is dependent on humidity, operative temperature, clothing level, metabolic rate, and air flow rate. And people are general only comfortable in environments that are 30-60% relatively humid so that’s a pretty small window.
Mold growth is actually slowed down by cold. Cold by itself would not grow mold, you'd need relatively high humidity and lack of ventilation. The home construction and regional climate determines how prevalent mold is.
For a fun anecdote, they even made a song about this: "I don' t wanna get out of futon"[0]. It's about how cold everything is in the house, except for the bedding you've already warmed up, or the place where you turned the space heater on.
Since the last time this was posted, it also doesn’t account for potential mold build up due to the increase of moisture without the dryness you get from heating. I know this first hand because I’ve tried doing this before the article was written. It’s been posted several times on HN already
There are also tropical people living in somewhat less than tropical climates too. They have shorter nostrils. My girlfriend is one of them and has especially short nostrils. Whenever the air gets cold she gets terrible nosebleeds, headaches and more. Outside, she has to put a scarf over her nose.
My long narrow nose is great at conditioning the air, but conversely I can't breathe through my nose when I exercise...
Your nostril length is absolutely relevant. Maybe not by the time it gets to your lungs, but it for sure causes problems for the sensitive tissues inside the nose.
"Such a nose is unsuited for cold countries as it permits masses of cold air to flood the air passages and irritate the lining membrane, so that the nose must be large and have much warming surface, and the nostrils therefore are slender slits to admit air in thin ribbons easily warmed."
A lot of times this just does not work for me. Even if the air is a temperature I would like, a room with cold walls, well ... you can literally feel it. It's a blackbody radiation thing ... you are emitting heat but the walls aren't emitting as much as you are, and it feels like heat falling off of my body. Which is fine sometimes but if I need to get work done, I go into torpor.
I may be unusually sensitive to infrared: one of my backrub tricks is apparently "kknowing" what hurts without being told. Aside from posture, if you just wave your hands over someone's back, you can feel the heat come off more in any inflamed or tense area.
I believe infrared comfort of your room is far more important than people give it credit. Indeed in terms of warmth, direct infrared heating is far faster and more efficient than convection (albeit directional), so why wouldn't the same be true of cooling?
Personally, I can feel whether I'm facing the outdoor wall or not with my eyes shut, no matter how hot the room is. Predictably, that side gets cold even if my back is sweating.
I suspect most people are the same and don't necessarily realise it (e.g. why do many people prefer cooler air temps in the summer and warmer air temps in winter, even controlled for humidity?) because there's just no common way of measuring or altering your rooms radiation values besides insulation.
In the US wood construction is the norm for residential buildings.
These cannot go below a certain temperature, not much below 60F, otherwise dry rot will slowly but permanently damage these buildings in most places (depends on humidity). I suppose if you drop the humidity below a certain point you might get by with pretty low temperatures.
I think this is an overstatement of the situation; it's true that you're supposed to keep the house from getting too cold, but it's within living memory in many places that in the colder parts of the winter, standing water jugs would have a thin layer of ice in the morning. They wouldn't stay below freezing, but they'd cycle through temperatures much below 60F (15C) on a daily basis for several months of the year. Even now I think it's more common to set the thermostat down around 50 or 55 when you'll be out of town, and I know people who don't set it much above 60 in the winter even when they're awake and at home, quite a bit lower when they're asleep or out.
I lived in an Australian house on the shady side of a narrow stream valley, temperate climate. If you didn't heat in winter, dew would form on the walls inside at night as temp fell and mold would grow everywhere
One concept I've toyed with for a while is a laser blanket. A ceiling mounted infrared camera measures the temperature across your body, and an infrared laser automatically goes and "paints" any part that is insufficiently warm. No idea if it would be comfortable at all, but fun project.
Microwave frequencies used in ovens would be dangerous because they can penetrate deep in the body and heat internal tissues, but in the EHF range microwave heating could be safe. See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System
With all that said, what I had in mind is in the far less scary and far more prosaic near-infrared range.
I wouldn't buy a car without seat and steering wheel heating anymore. Much more efficient than heating the air (even it the "room" is relatively tiny in a car).
I guess the same principle (concentrate energy on a small target to get better results) is at play with Beefers and AirFyers.
If it’s an IC engine, the convection heating is waste heat from the engine. So the electric heaters in the wheel and seats are massively less efficient.
I imagine that the challenge is maintaining a constant temperature. If you want to use cool air from outside to cool the food you either need a way to stop doing that when it gets too cold or include a heating element. Both options will probably get expensive quite fast.
If you want to save energy buying a coolbox and storing some stuff outside during the winter is probably far easier and cheaper ;)
You'd have to put a vent through the wall. People do this for clothes dryers. But for fridges it's probably not worth it - worthless in summer, and in winter the bad insulation around the vent likely cancels out the electricity savings.
I know freezers with a top door, but no fridges - and frankly, I imagine a top-loaded fridge to be impractical in kitchen use unless there is some way to reach the bottom more easily. Do you have a link to a fridge like that so I can imagine the concept better?
> Do you have a link to a fridge like that so I can imagine the concept better?
Large camping fridges are as close as I have seen, but I'm sure someone's thought of one for domestic use.
As for practicality in the kitchen, I can imagine a design where you have multiple medium sized fridge drawers. Once pulled out, you can open their top lid and access the content. This way, you don't have one deep container, but rather, multiple shallower containers. For efficiency, a single compressor can feed all of them.
EDIT: actually I've seen freezer drawers - you just need to dial the cooling down a bit.
Another idea: Vertically long rectangular compartments that can be pulled out individually. Essentially a whole bunch of vertical drawers of different sizes, with meshed walls to allow air to pass through them.
Another silly idea: a horizontally mounted ferris wheel
A really good way to heat yourself up fast is to drink tea or soup a hot beverage. Personally I don't really like wearing coats for some reason, they're uncomfortable and they don't heat me up as well. The inverse is true as well: a cold drink will help you cool off in hot weather.
I was recently diagnosed with sleep apnea and got a CPAP machine. It has the option to control temperature and humidity in the air that's pumped through it. A few weeks ago my heater went out. Nothing serious, but it took a week to get it fixed. I'm in Southern California, so it's not like life or death or anything.
It turns out if you just turn the heat up in your CPAP machine it works fantastically well as a personal heater. It would be 45°F in my house, 80°F coming out of my CPAP machine, and I'd be lying in bed under a sheet with no pajamas and sweating. I actually had to turn the temperature down to 76°F get a good night's sleep.
On the same train of thought, I keep myself warm in winter by regularly exercising. Nothing fancy, just some squats and knee raises. Heat from the inside out works wonders.
A design detail I appreciate about this website is that it's server is solar powered and displays a two-tone overlay representing the server's battery life. It's nice that they extend their scrutiny of resource usage and sustainability to their own infrastructure.
Side note: usually when I've visited the site, the battery is up around 80% or higher. The "hacker-news effect", while not causing a 502 or other server error in this case, at least at for the time being, does have the battery down around 35%.
Are new the macbooks really running cold? I haven't used the arm models but the intel ones would always seem to be warm with that lava hot spot on the bottom no matter the state of the fans.
For normal web browser usage, they are basically completely cold. For full docker nodejs webpack development they are a little warm just above the keyboard but only barely noticeable. For gaming running the system at max for prelonged periods they get “hot” but it’s more like just a bit over warm. They never get lava hot like the intel MacBooks did.
IIRC many phones are designed to radiate heat from the screen for similar reasons, keeps the device comfortable for the user and improves cooling effectiveness since phones are usually screen up.
The temperature of the house is not uniform - areas are colder than others. But when you heat up to 68F - then the really cold areas of the house stay (usually) above freezing. If you let the house drop to 60-55 F - there's no guarantee that the colder parts of your walls and pipes freeze.
a house i occasionally looked after suffered some pipe damage because somebody else thought setting the thermostat to 50F would suffice to keep the pipes from freezing in the depths of winter.
Maybe in your house, but the temperature here drops into the 50s at night (or when we're on vacation) regularly in the winter, and zero issues or signs of anything freezing. When we're not using it, we set the thermostat at 10C / 50F.
> If you let the house drop to 60-55 F - there's no guarantee that the colder parts of your walls and pipes freeze.
That sounds like pretty high variation? ~25-30 deg F?
Because of that article I bought a hot water bottle on Amazon. I’ve had it for about a month now. It’s very pleasing to use to heat a bed in a way that an electric blanket isn’t: it is much faster at warming, gives you heat in exactly the place you want it, and you don’t fear your house burning down using it.
At night, the heat is off. Just a warm comforter is plenty in almost any weather, and the cool air feels great. In fact, I always try to position the head of my bed near a window and even in cold weather, at least crack open the window - breathing fresh air all night feels great.
For anyone who has gone camping, they know that a warm enough sleeping bag is fine, no problem at all, and again, the fresh air is a wonderful part of the experience.
> camping is famously hated by a significant portion of the population
Not very famously, because I haven't heard that. Some people don't like it, I have no doubt. No matter what is suggested, nay-sayers can point to some people not liking it; what does it mean? And the people who don't like camping likely object to other aspects of it - just random chance among many aspects, and many much more burdensome such as carrying all your stuff, the food, less personal sanitation, no TV, no sushi or pizza delivery, etc. etc. I don't recall hearing anyone in my life object to fresh air, but I'm sure someone does!
In high latitude Australia I reckon this is seems to be the norm. A lot of prison colony age houses still and not great insulation so attempting to maintain a warm temp in the entire house would be expensive, plus it typically doesn't get that much below freezing even if that. If you don't have a wood burner stove it is common to have a couple panel heaters in strategic rooms, use hot water bottles in bed, etc.
Instead of having a convection heater for my whole room, I taped a mylar blanket around my desk, under which I have a radiant heater which I can easily adjust.
I definitely lean towards this approach, and warm my apartment to standard levels for my area only when company is coming over. But I think I developed mild but extremely irritating chilblains on my fingers from keeping my living space at 13-18°C. Now I diligently wear gloves (just the cheap, light kind) in such temperatures, even indoors. Just an anecdote but I can't really recommend the approach.
I was genuinely quite comfortable until that issue arose. I always spend an hour or two outside no matter the weather anyway, but it's also only seasonally cold here. It'll be too hot again before I know it!
hey this is the article/magazine i got the ideas to use bitcoin-type miners for heating my greenhouse and home, as well as incandescent lighting for heat.
Technology Connections had an aside on the heat pump video about how in the northern US doing away with incandescent lighting has probably meant more CO2 in the air overall, since every "wasteful" bulb also puts heat in a room, reducing overall heating load while providing something useful, visible light. LEDs are 20-33 times more efficient than incandescent, but now your heating system has to make up that lost wattage.
Sure, in the south, i literally only use inefficient bulbs to heat. I prefer LED for everything except slow motion video, in all other areas i find it superior lighting. I do find that large CFLs last 8 years outdoors, so i have two of those for my porches. I haven't found any comparable LED.
On the cold days (like this past day has been), I wish i had more floor standing lights with incandescents in them!
> every object on earth radiates infared energy as long as it has mass and a temperature above absolute zero. This energy can be absorbed by other objects with a lower temperature.
What happens to infrared energy when it hits objects with higher temperature than radiating object?
I've setup a server running 24/7 and I barely have to turn on the heaters even in 30F weather. I think the building is insulated. Also glad my gaming laptop heats my lap.
It's terrible in the summer though. I think I'll repurpose some 140mm pwm case fans.
I had this thought when I got an electric blanket. What's the point of heating the whole room when with a mere 60 watt you can have a warm and cozy bed. Electric clothes would be ideal, if we could find a solution for small and practical batteries.
Modern saunas that use infrared bulbs (radiation transfer) to sweat you claim to be better than traditional saunas which use use steam (conduction transfer then convection transfer). I’m still not sure which one gives the most benefit/least harm.
I have a "neat trick" of putting a blanket over myself such that my hands and laptop keyboard are both underneath, but the screen is sticking out. Then I run a cryptominer to generate some heat. Inside of five minutes, I'm pretty warm!
I actually looked into using directed infrared heating to heat myself as a more efficient solution. Given the high electricity costs in Germany I realized it would still be cheaper just to heat the entire apartment the old fashioned way.
I have a two story home with one central air unit and the distribution of heat is terrible, some rooms get super hot, the whole downstairs is super cold. Are there any affordable steps one can take to improve these kinda of problems?
This is not particularly affordable, but most things that cost more will be a waste of money. If HVAC balancing fails:
Replace the furnace with a heat pump with a variable rate fan and compressor. The unit will run constantly at low speed.
It will also be super energy efficient, so there might be tax incentives.
You can get a hybrid gas or resistive heat model, which will fall back on conventional methods of heating as appropriate.
As upgrades, you could add a central (de)humidifier, air exchanger, and forest fire smoke air filter, depending on what other problems your area has.
You could also try getting a two zone system (separate temperature control and blowers for upstairs and downstairs), but that probably means tearing into walls or something. The always on slow + quiet fan is a much better solution.
Identify the really hot rooms, see if the windows are modern. If not, replace with double-pane, low-e windows.
Sorry, all I can think of that's maybe affordable.
As other's say though, closing off vents and such you might be able to manually re-balance the house. My last home had two "zones" and therefore two thermostats. But it required also some complicated baffles in the ventilation system to open and/or close the two zones independently. I didn't install it, it might have been pricey to do so.
There have been many articles about heating recently, most likely due to expected European gas shortages.
But the bigger issue is how to cool off. Every summer has been hotter than the previous, and things are getting worse. Are there any effective ways to cool a dwelling, other than the traditional electrically-powered air conditioning? I've seen evaporative coolers, but what can people do who live in humid environments? Or have water restrictions?
If you want to wear gloves, then finger and hand mobility is effected, and usually with hands, it's the fingers that are cold anyway, making fingerless gloves not feel that useful.
While if the room is all one consistent warm enough temperature, you don't get these cold & hot spot effects.