An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:07 PM UTC

dyauspitr wrote: post #26

ynac wrote: post #10

When we lost power for 10 days a few winters back we attempted to use the fire place for heat. It was a fail. Post and beam house (large wide open floor plan) with a large transfer from 1st to 2nd floor, and apprently my lack of skill for optimizing heat over beauty in the fireplace, left us without much of a thermal bump. To this day I swear we were pulling heat out of the chimney faster than we were heating the hou…

Yeah fireplaces don’t make sense to me. Hot air rises and it sucks the existing heated air in the house which all flows out. The only way to heat the space is you need something with a lot of thermal mass that heats up in the process and then radiates heat. So a lot of bricks around the fire, some sort of baffle to enable the heat transfer and a system that sucks in air from the outside.

Post by Glawen » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:12 PM UTC

secondcoming wrote: post #29

Glawen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And make a bathroom practical and enjoyable. Sink with hot and cold tap, electric water heater in shower, come on...

I don't think I've ever been in a UK home that didn't have these, except perhaps the electric shower; older homes may still use immersion heating for hot water. Were you in prison when you experienced the above?

Post by peterfirefly » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:20 PM UTC

rappatic wrote: post #50

> The house has lessons for how we can heat our homes more efficiently today The problem in Europe isn't keeping warm in the winter but keeping cool in the summer. In part thanks to their near-total lack of AC in residential buildings, Europe has an extremely high heat-related death rate. 200k people per year die of heatstroke in Europe: this accounts for 36% of global heat-related deaths. This is despite Europe bein…

Post by bombcar » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:29 PM UTC

themaninthedark wrote: post #54

quesera wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like the wisdom is lost , it's just ignored in modern builds. All architects think about siting and solar exposure. But the builders are in charge, and they optimize for what the market responds to -- which does not always include factors like these which contribute to long-term comfort and livability. So I would say that consumers could learn a thing or two. That said, most buyers are not buying newly-built…

Even when the buyer is buying a newly built house, it's often already built or being built off of already existing plans that do not take these things into account.

Post by oezi » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 9:31 PM UTC

lazide wrote: post #42

pipes wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you think about the point in the article suggesting millions of people dying on South America caused the earth to cool down due to reforestation absorbing more green house gas. I find this hard to believe.

There was a noticable (and well recorded) change in the climate for awhile when Ghenghis Khan went on his rampage. And he was a lot less effective at killing people than novel old world diseases. It doesn’t seem completely implausible.