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Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011)

lowtechmagazine.com

181–190 of 314 posts

Re: Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011)

#181
post #53

> Because vasoconstriction only occurs when the core body temperature falls, it won't happen if you're dressed warmly enough. While insulating your neck and feet will greatly improve your thermal comfort, there is no need to wear gloves or caps indoors. In fact, it doesn't matter very much which parts of your body you choose to insulate - the important thing is to limit total heat loss so that the body core temperatu…

my feet can be cold even under a proper winter blanket. in my case, it's a symptom of iron deficiency anemia. it can also be bad blood circulation for other reasons.

Re: Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011)

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it cooler indoors in New Zealand during the winter than I did in the UK for this reason. NZ pretends it’s always warm and has little home insulation, or none in my house, except the ceiling which I did. New Zealand has very poor housing.

I found a week-long business trip to South Island in the winter terribly cold. Going from 30°C weather to 12°C isn't a great start, but then the otherwise-decent hotel had single glazed windows, which the maid would open every morning. The only heater in the room was an electric resistance one attached to the wall. In offices, most of the foreigners on the trip were wearing coats and other extra layers. Young people…

We're not that tough. Any house built in the past 15 years must meet the newer regulations of double-glazing and roof,wall,floor insulation. There are plenty of older properties without any of these standards and these are terrible and are also probably the most likely to be Holiday homes or AirBnBs, but any houses that are tenanted now need to be upgraded to meet minimum standards.

Most private houses also have efficient heat-pumps in at least one room, I could never work out why we still use aluminum window frames though over normal uPVC, which are still not even an option in most new builds.

Personally I would ban resistive heating, they are generally in lower cost rentals, student properties etc and cost a lot for the tenant to use especially as these tenants are generally at the poorer side of the fence.

Stayed in some really cold crappy holiday homes in the south island one we had to leave the electric stove/oven on full to get it to bearable!

Re: Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011)

#183
post #123
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humid -40C air becomes very dry +20C air when it gets inside a heated house. Saturated vapour density, the basis of relative humidity, about doubles every 10C.

Have you ever experienced Humid -40C air? It doesn't happen. I've had very humid -25C air in Alaska, and wearing literally everything I own (which is perfect at -48C), I was freezing cold for the entire day, even when running, snowboarding, jumping up and down and beating my chest.

> Have you ever experienced Humid -40C air? It doesn't happen.

> I've had very humid -25C air in Alaska

You haven't had very humid -25C air, in an absolute sense. Take a look at a vapour pressure calculator (https://www.omnicalculator.com/chemistry/vapour-pressure-of-...): the vapour pressure of water at -25C is about 63 Pa, but about 13 Pascals at -40C. The difference of 50 Pa is trivial compared to the ~100,000 Pa pressure of air at sea level. Once you're below 0C, there just isn't enough water around in a vapour (or suspended) phase to have much impact.

A Globe and Mail article from 2016 discussed this phenomenon (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/fitn...). Its conclusions were still tentative, but the strongest correlate of the effect seemed to be cloud cover, where bright sunlight felt warmer despite colder air temperatures.

Re: Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011)

#185

Living in cold home isn't particularly hard. Doing precision work with your hands (such as writing or typing) is decidedly harder in colder homes. You can wear certain kinds of gloves, but it just isn't as pleasant.

The muscles that actuate your fingers are largely located in your forearms. Keep your core out to your wrists properly bundled, and you'll be fine without gloves.

Re: Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011)

#186
post #97

Being able to be comfortable in our homes while being minimally clothed in the winter is one of those "luxuries" of the fossil fuel age that we take for granted. The constellation of technologies needed to achieve this efficiently (with far less fossil fuels) and healthily (with healthy internal air quality) exists: heat pumps, heat-recovery-ventilators, airtight but vapor permeable house sealing materials - the stan…

> Being able to be comfortable in our homes while being minimally clothed in the winter is one of those "luxuries" of the fossil fuel age that we take for granted. Did you know that the Romans had under-floor heating.

That’s based on low population densities, and inequality in terms of commanding labour (getting slaves to cut down trees and keep the heating system for a large house running) and in accessing natural resources (a house having enough acreage of land to grow enough wood to keep the heating system going).

It’s something which is a luxury in the absence of fossil fuels, or the rollout of new technologies they mention.

Re: Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011)

#187
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of this keeps my hands warm. Or makes me feel comfortable. After growing up in a house with no insulation and being miserable all winter long, now for an extra ~$50 a month during the winter I get to keep my house at a nice toasty 74-76 degrees F and I'm comfortable year round.

Keeping your core warmer, especially with the thermal underwear discussed at length in the article, will also keep your hands warmer. There's an entire section of the article titled "Hands and feet". You could read it instead of dismissing the whole idea out of hand.

> Keeping your core warmer, especially with the thermal underwear discussed at length in the article, will also keep your hands warmer.

That's a lesson of wilderness camping in cold weather - if your hands are cold, put on another layer.

Re: Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011)

#188
post #179

I realise I'm likely an outlier here, but I absolutely hate every single clothing piece shown in the article. This is because I dislike tight clothes in general and long sleeves in particular. It is also unclear how much actual savings can be achieved by lowering the temperature. I would love to see the curves ($ savings for lowering average temp by 1 degree) for modern buildings (good insulation) for different clima…

I was homeless for a few years. That means I stayed warm at night in freezing temps by piling three people into a too-small tent (one designed for two people) and sharing "bio heat" as our only heat source.

I hate long sleeves and seldom wore them.

Tight clothing actually cuts off your circulation and makes you colder.

The right material -- flannel, wool, sometimes knitwear -- can keep you warm even when wet.

Being cleaner helps keep you warm.

Eating warm cheese, like a quesadilla, helps keep you warm.

Because of my medical situation, I don't have carpeting, upholstered furniture, etc. My home is a lot less prone to being too hot in summer and too cold in winter than when I was living the standard North American Lifestyle steeped in Affluenza.

I keep intending to someday blog about such things, but it's always such insane drama to comment on it on internet forums that I figure there's no point and haven't gotten around to it. But we really don't talk about how our lifestyles have changed so much in recent decades and we seem to, on the whole, not wonder about things like "I wonder if a hundred years ago people were fundamentally more comfortable, temperature-wise, than they are today because their homes were more spartan simply because no one had the kind of wealth we have today?"

There's a lot of things that have changed and we seem oblivious to the possibility that those large scale changes may account for some of the issues individuals are experiencing. We tend to just medicalize it and act like "You, as an individual, have some kind of personal problem."

Re: Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011)

#189

I expect people on HN to have already figured out the obvious: It takes much less energy to heat the area under your clothes, using existing heat, than to heat a room or building with artificially generated heat. Your body is 37 deg C. Wearing low-insulation clothing and letting that heat float away, and then heating the entire room or building to warm you up again, is absurd if you understand basic physics and think…

> Heating a building when you aren't there is silly.

Is this true? I've thought about it for a while but can't quite wrap my head around an answer that feels obviously correct. It takes a lot of energy to raise the temperature of a house - more than to maintain a given temperature. Allowing for changing temperatures during the day, and concrete slabs and walls and the ground as heat stores, is it always the case that it uses less energy to have a lower set point while you're out and raise it when you get home than to just keep it at the comfortable level the whole time?

Re: Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011)

#190
Related question:

What's the best way to ventilate an old european house during winter?

I've taken up the habit of letting my bedroom windows (slightly) open at nighttime to have fresh air while sleeping. I'm unsure this is really wise ecologically since outside air == cold air, but at the same time, there is no other way to get fresh air…

Any tip, or, better, professional opinion?

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