Human Heater anyone?
Heat people, not spaces (2015)
91–100 of 335 posts
Re: Heat people, not spaces (2015)
#92We 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.
I understand the appeal of a swimming pool on a sweltering summer day but if you have to heat it...
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.
Re: Heat people, not spaces (2015)
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
People lived before 1902 and the invention of compressor-based air conditioning.
Not in all the places and densities that they do today.
Re: Heat people, not spaces (2015)
#94Instead 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.
Re: Heat people, not spaces (2015)
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
How, that's a huge temperature gradient. 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.
Yup. I live two hours north of Boston; our coldest winter temp most years is -25, and we usually just touch 100 one day in the summer.
Re: Heat people, not spaces (2015)
#96Human Heater anyone?
I would've thought more people would've mentioned this in this thread.
Re: Heat people, not spaces (2015)
#97I 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.
Re: Heat people, not spaces (2015)
#98A 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%.
Re: Heat people, not spaces (2015)
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 bedro…
what state and what was the average humidity, or even better dew point? I personally find fans made very little difference for me in humid climates.
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.
Re: Heat people, not spaces (2015)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ventilation doesn't help much with humidity, which frequently overlaps with the heat. I get by without AC in the northern Midwest, but I'd be inclined to get a window unit if there was more than a few uncomfortable nights a year.
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.
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