The goldfish tank froze solid in the summer? :eek:
I read a newspaper article online within the last year, probably the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, about a young woman who lives in a city in China who went back on a winter holiday to visit her family in their rural home.
The house is one room and in a part of China where the winter temperature goes below freezing for days at a time. Her family pretty much keep their heavy coats on all winter, indoors or out, and I think in bed as well. They’ve always done that, and presumably most of the people in their village do as well. The temperature inside the house while the reporter was there was at best in the 40s F IIRC.
So I think depending on where you are in the world it might still be as cold indoors as it was in days of yore (when exactly was “yore”, anyway?).
We live in Hokkaido now, in a wood-framed, plastic sided, very poorly insulated house. It has three bedrooms upstairs and 6 rooms downstairs and one kerosene stove for the lot. That one is in the living room and is vented to the outside, so on very very cold nights we keep it on all night. Right now I switch it on to a timer when I go to bed at about midnight and it comes on at 5am.
We have a small free standing kerosene space heater on the landing upstairs and have taken all the doors off the bedrooms to allow heat to circulate.
If I am home all day, so the stove can stay on downstairs, then the living room is hot - about 27C (80F) but if we reduce the temperature then upstairs or the other room downstairs that we use a lot is going to be about 13C (55F) which is too cold to work in. We have ceiling fans in the living room and the upstairs landing and they really help to redistribute the heat.
My MIL keeps her extremely well insulated (six pane of glass between her and the outside world - three double glazed panels on each window!) and modern house as warm as 30C (86F) which is mental because it very rarely gets that hot here naturally (Only for about four unbearable weeks in August/Sept when it hits 40C!) but she has 60 out of 75 years of perishing cold memories for six months of the year. My husband is in his mid 40’s but he was dressed in coats and hats to go to bed, and the covers were iced from his breath every morning.
When we were first married in the mid 1990’s we lived in Nagano in the mountains of Honshu, and we had to keep contact lenses and toothpaste in the fridge so that they would not freeze overnight… It was bloody horrible and I pretty much lived in one room all winter.
Right now fuel prices are rising madly here too (in the four years since we bought our house the price of kerosene has nearly doubled) so that there is now a phenomenon of “Kerosene nomads” - the elderly who are driven out of their houses during the day so they don’t have to pay to heat them. They go shopping, ride on circular bus routes, go to the library and any other public facilities so as to keep warm. It is really a problem here now.
Why is insulation such a great enigma in so many (cold) parts of the world? You don’t need fancy fiberglass to get the job done. Straw between the walls is a very effective insulator. The Australian government calls it The most cost effective insulation available.
Most every place has straw of some sort – its not exactly expensive. Why so many uninsulated homes!? confusion
Actually it is, depending on how you do it (its described in detail within the link in my post) but I’m speaking of rural places, and places in the past, when “following the building code” wasn’t exactly top of mind for a person building a house. Wooden and thatched homes are kinda flammable already. Freezing to death on the other hand, was a legitimate concern.
Sod is also an excellent insulator. I pretty sure there’s dirt almost everywhere.
I just watched Saturday morning PBS yesterday and one of the shows is building a straw bale house. The r-factor for a 3-string bale is something like R50 and the smaller, 2-string bale is like R35…very efficient and very “green”.
