I was told that this was for health regulations. Like I said, when the windows were closed, it smelled like a dumpster.
Interesting location though. One of these days I’ll have to get back there.
I also went to Iowa State University, in my case in the 1980s. I also looked into joining the Greek system, but decided not to. Yes, some of the houses were still using cold air dorms. All the members, except if you were sick, slept in bunk beds in one big sleeping room. There were also 2 person rooms, where stuff was stored, students studied and where you slept if you were sick.
The general understanding, while I was there, was that the sleeping rooms were so that you had a room dedicated to sleeping, cutting down on annoyance of having to share a room with someone that slept different hours then you did. The windows in the cold air dorm were kept partially open for health reasons, but I suspect it was also because of smell.
But many of these people lived short lives in which disease was far more prevalent than it is today. The fact that people have lived in the cold throughout history does not mean that they were healthy when they did so.
Practice, practice, practice. Some groups of people live in very cold houses (cf. Greenland). It might be better to ask what’s unhealthy for your house. In my climate, too many days with the thermostat below about 62 leads to mildew.
As a student, I spent a Canadian winter in a house with no heat. Some of my students spent a Canadian winter in a tent. Either way, there were no health problems. It was, however, very annoying to always have to be dressed for the the cold.
Another thing you may want to consider is what is healthy for the house itself. I was told that you should keep the house at least 50-55F or higher for it’s general health, but they didn’t say why. So for the first few seasons I set the temp at 43F, the lowest the thing could be set. I started noticing cracked sheetrock on the ceiling which I now attribute to the temp’s I set being too cold which caused the sheetrock or the beams to contract too much. Once I started having the min temp at 55F the cracking stopped.
Since we’re getting all anecdotal anyway…I haven’t used my heat in years. During a usual southern Virginia winter, the temperature in my apartment during the winter hangs around 45-50F during the day, and has dropped below freezing at night, though upper 30s is more common. When I lived in upstate New York, I’d turn my heat on when ice started to form on the inside of the windows (usually around 25F indoor temperature) to avoid hypothermic death.
None of this seems to have done me any harm; I don’t spend a lot of time sick. Whether I’m “healthy” or not is probably up for debate (especially among the cold-natured crowd), but physically speaking, at least, my igloo-dwelling tendencies have served me well.
I would think as long as you don’t go into frostbite you’re fine. You would be uncomfortable but that’s a personal thing.
If you look at old movies or read old books you always see people hating to get out of bed because they’d have to run and turn on the stove or turn on the furnace. So evidently they were not using heat at night.
When I talk to the seniors at the retirement center I volunteer at they seem to have a tolerance for cold. Actually I don’t think they do, they just won’t admit it, so it doesn’t stop them. And on the flip, when I ask them about the heat, they say “In my day if it got to hot, you’d grab a sheet and go sleep under a tree in the park.”
wow–all those posts about fraternities keeping all the windows open seem a little weird to me. Just how crowded was it in those cold dorms?
I just gotta ask, 'cause I’ve seen other places which have lots of people sleeping together, but don’t have special rules requiring open windows:
–military barracks
–jail
–kid’s summer camp
–15 hour airplane flights
(disclaimer: I only have personal experience with three of the above 
)
Agreed (though no doubt a substantial percentage were). But the nature of most of the old diseases is known, and none is caused by living at, say, 50F instead of 72F.
It is certainly plausible that, having acquired some disease, your ability to recover from it could be affected by the ambient temperature. And it’s accurate to say that if your extremities are turning grey with frostbite, you are living at an unhealthy temperature.
A lot depends on what you’re wearing. I was at my mom’s house for a few weeks over Christmas, and she keeps her thermostat somewhere between 50 and 55 Farenheit to save money on the gas bill. It was perfectly fine, provided you were wearing long pants, a long-sleeved flannel, and a sweatshirt over that. If you’re one of those folks who goes around in shorts and a t-shirt all winter, though, it might be pretty bad.
You say “still”, but actually my fraternity was under construction and not finished until fall 1991. The cold-air dorms were built into the construction plans. I don’t know the reason for the fact that the windows were supposed to be open but I do understand the legal reason (at least what I was told at the time) for designing the house with one particular location designated to sleeping.
Apparently there is some legal deal for a fraternity (or whatever fits under that legal classification) where a certain percentage of the house (or whatever the legal designation is) that must be dedicated towards studying in order to receive a certain tax credit (or something like that.) Having the sleeping quarters concentrated in one small area allowed the fraternity to classify the remaining area as “study” area. If the members were to sleep in their rooms, then the rooms would qualify as “living” area rather than “study” area.
Since I was there when the house was new, I can tell you that the rules about where members were supposed to sleep were diligently obeyed for for about a month. After two years, the older students slept wherever the fuck they wanted and the new kids (mostly pledges) had to stuff it if they didn’t like it. Like many of the others in the house, I personally always slept in the cold air room, because, frankly, the room we had to live in was just too small to sleep in and expect people to keep their stuff and generally live out of. I also had considerably more respect for my roomates. There were plenty of larger rooms; however, where the older members simply told their roomates to “fuck off” and actually slept with their girlfreinds nightly. That meant of course, that if a newer member had books to get for study, and the “senior” member was “busy” (as usually designated by a hanger on the doorknob), they were screwed.
Electric carpet?
As we bitched and moaned about last month, in the 4 northmost New England states had a massive ice storm and over a million people lost power. Many lost power for several days. On the third day it went down to 3F outside, and was 52F inside with a kerosene heater and constant fire in the fireplace; we were fine. Other folks didn’t have either heat source, and there were still no reports of people getting hypothermia. And it’s not as though people went to shelters instead, they opened 64 in NH and served just a few hundred people out of the half a million or so without power. (how many people does one expect in 400,000 homes?)
The only physical consequence of nearly a week of chilly indoor temperatures was [tmi follows] Either due to cold, stress, and/or a lot more exercise than usual, my period stopped a day early during the power failure. I didn’t mind, until it returned a week after the power came on and stayed for the usual duration! Nine days in one month is awful
I live in Bogota, Colombia and the temps this time of year here run on the average of 45° - 65°. We don’t have any internal heating and probably don’t need any. If temps get cold, we just wear sweaters. Never gets too warm.
Sometimes at other times of the year, the temps get down to high 30’s and we need sweaters all day.
Its the smell of the unwashed masses yearning to pee free.
Well, if I had to guess based on how I remember the smell, probably somebody got drunk and vomited then didn’t do a thorough cleanup. Probably, five or six people did that over the course of several years. Then there was the guy that had a tendency to urinate when he got drunk. And what is that bitter note? Perhapse a bit of fermented butt cheese.
All I know is the day we tried to close the windows people were evacuating within an hour. It was extremely foul.
First, igloos aren’t that cold on the inside. Second, you can actually live in pretty cold conditions as long as you have enough insulation to keep your core temperature up and prevent any extremities from freezing.
As I’ve ranted about before, Japanese houses suck. The inside temperature in my place was about 5ºC (41ºF) this morning. Outside was only about -2, so not that cold, really. Note the very small difference between outside and inside temperature, though. It has been so cold that my kerosine heater can’t actually keep up with the heat loss past a certain point. Equilibrium is around 15ºC (59ºF) in most of those cases. Apparently, up north and in Hokkaido housing is a bit better. I’d certainly hope so, 'cause people would probably be freezing to death if they had to endure -20 or more in housing like my place.
I’m lucky I don’t mind the cold too much. I’m the guy who wears t-shirts about 3 or 4 weeks after everyone else has already switched to sweaters.