41–50 of 99 posts
This sounds like a good idea until mold starts growing in your house. Back in the day the houses were not insulated as tightly and people did not shower every day.
http://www.rockrun.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9...
but I can't see it catching on. People like their comforts.
At least in Japan and most parts of China, houses are poorly insulated and heating is often from aircon, which means if you want to stay warm, you wear thick clothes inside, sit under a heated blanket and what not. This sucks. Your nose and hands are still cold. If you want to move from the blanket its cold. I don't see anything that really addresses this. Yeah, the insulated chair is nice when you sit on it, but wha…
3 Points: 1. Cars are moving into this with heated seats, and even heated steering wheels. Electric cars in cooler climates that don't have the excess heat production of an IC engine will depend on it to keep occupants warm. 2. There was an article a while back on HN about a fellow that had a computer desk with a heated keyboard, heated mouse, heated floor mat (designed for animal cages) and a warm incandescent light…
I have these things right now (well, not the flight schedule thing since that happens so little that I prefer manual control) with a few hundred $ worth of home automation gear and a regular PC as the control center. Anyone with a bit of hacker mindset can build such a thing, really.
This sounds like a good idea until mold starts growing in your house. Back in the day the houses were not insulated as tightly and people did not shower every day.
In the UK we have plenty of old houses where there is no central heating, double glazing, loft insulation or fitted carpet. Typically the windows are wood framed 'sash' windows with the walls made from quite thick stone (1 - 4+ ft thick). Heating might be just the one fireplace with the kitchen cooker also there to warm the house up. I grew up in such a house and not once did I see mould. Typically such houses were b…
The smothering of the fire is even worse. Try smothering a closed fireplace and watch the glass of the doors turn black in a few hours. That's all stuff that would have gone into the room, and into the lungs of those in there, had there not been a door in the fireplace; and even with a door, there is still hazardous material that makes it into the room.
It better be cheap; it's possible to build an affordable house that is well-insulated enough that the plug loads will be higher than the heating loads. In a very cold climate, you also need to keep your house fairly warm to avoid problems like frozen pipes. Ironically, the wasted heat caused by poor building practices can help make buildings more durable by facilitating the drying of the external walls (less of a con…
Agreed. They seemed oddly insistent on pushing their implicit premise that heating large volumes of air is wasteful. http://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e8883301bb07e... However, the volume of air is not inextricably linked to energy expenditure, which only happens when heat flows down a gradient, not while it sits in a room. We can model it like a simple resistive circuit; the equations are analogous. V =…
This sounds like a good idea until mold starts growing in your house. Back in the day the houses were not insulated as tightly and people did not shower every day.
Invest ten bucks in a hygrometer and open the windows when the humidity gets too high. Mold is not caused by cold temperatures.
