The castles and mansions were relatively modern. Most people didn't have "good" home design, they had older, practical architecture. Their homes had thin walls, were drafty, and had no chimneys; there was a hole in the roof where the smoke from your fire would go, so your attic was filled with smoke (where you'd smoke meats for winter).
You're better served by looking to 19th century lower and middle class architecture. Right before air conditioning, but with relatively modern designs using modern building materials and practices ("insulation" (horsehair and newspaper), fireplaces/stoves, corridors with doors to separate cold rooms from hot ones, windows designed to allow cross-breezes, covered porches to provide shade in summer, etc). Right before air conditioning came in, we had pretty much gotten to the peak of design that used natural forms of temperature regulation. Some designs even created mini greenhouses of glass, with half the wall mounted with earth, for thermal regulation as well as solar heating. The only better passive methods invented since then is geothermal.
The peak of winter heat management were the pechka, Russian rocket stoves built into literal tons of masonry, for the most thermal mass possible. You'd heat it up once with a small amount of wood and it warms the house the whole day. They were so big you could sleep on top of it.
It immediately brings to mind when we had insulation blown into our walls, and the guy doing the work showing us the shredded newspaper treated with borax, and explaining how the borax made it fire-resistant.
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 house; I cooled the house with fire.
An open fire is not a particularly warm thing to have unless you’re directly in front of it. Most of the heat goes straight up the flue, and it uses an enormous amount of air to keep burning - it will pull huge volumes from rvertwhere it can. This is why these old buildings didn’t suffer from damp issues - the open fires burning were ventilating them.
Yeah, if you actually want to heat the house with fire you’ll want an insert or a wood stove. Otherwise most fireplaces in most houses are decorative, and one pays for that decoration with heat loss.
That’s not uncommon, but having grown up in a house heated by wood fires I knew that when building our current house. The main fireplace is on a central wall and has enormous thermal mass. Beauty and utility can be combined.
To use it effectively you want one with water jacket and just use that hot water with your normal house heating system. You don't need much power to run circulation pump so UPS + some solar panels should be enough even in deep winter. There are also systems that get it out of the exhaust but that doesn't get you much heat storage, just instant heat and generally less efficient.
Old school version of that were masonry stoves that come with ton+ of mass for the bricks and smoke being routed all over (often including a place to sleep) to take as much heat as possible from it.
If I had money for that I'd put a big hot water tank for buffer, heat it normally with heat pump, and just had emergency water-sheathed fireplate, with big buffer you can just fire it up once and have tank slowly give the heat back to the building. Or fire it up at the coldest days to save some heat pump power in days where there is barely any solar.
I know someone who gets through the winter off their fireplace. Really old timber house with riverrock chimney. Their fireplace looks nothing like what you think of a fire place looking. You can’t see the fire, there is like this big iron door in front of it. They go through a huge pile of wood every winter, along with a couple electric heaters for rooms or office.
I assume most decorative fireplaces on the other hand are not built to heat the house.
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.
Did you use a fire grate with a big space underneath and keep it swept clean? Or did you build up a big bed of ash under the grate? On the advice of a chimney sweep I put a perimeter of bricks under the grate to form walls and we're currently filling it with more and more ash (it really takes a while). It's starting to make a difference in how much heat comes back into the room. Without that void underneath, the fire doesn't burn so hot and cold air doesn't get pulled through so quickly.
(It feels like it's getting warmer - may all be wishful thinking though, I haven't taken any measurements!)
the fresh air inlet should be piped along the chimney walls, this would also recover the condensation heat of the water produced during combustion, but its not trivial to design while keeping in mind things like maintenance, different chimney column temperature (and thus different convective forces), capturing and effluence of the condensed water, ... the heated fresh air should not directly go to the fire but piped into the room.
> Pretty much all the fireplaces I see are also built on the central spine of the building, meaning not much heat would be lost to the windows or exterior wall.
Or maybe because, as the first half of the article say, it is because the outside walls have nowhere to put a fireplace, because they are covered in windows?
> he told me it can feel around 10C (18F) warmer inside on a cold winter's day. Other, typical Elizabethan houses, he estimates, would have only feel 2-3C (3.6-5.4F) warmer.
It 'feels' warmer...he 'estimates'. Nice way to do science
> Since it's winter, and cold, I move my desk to a south-eastern window. It brightens the mornings and if I wear another layer, I find I can lower the thermostat by 2C (3.6F).
More good science, change two variables but attribute the effect to only one of them. If I wear another layer of clothing, move my desk to the basement, sacrifice a goat, speak in tongues and draw a pentacle on the floor, I can turn the thermostat down 2 degrees too.
But let's start at the top
>England's longest river was usually flowing freely
Then list lots of evidence that it was not at all unusual for it to freeze at the time.
The river Thames in the Kingdom of England ( ~950 AD -> now +/- various other countries ) usually was freely flowing - just as the article states.
The article takes a long view of time, stretching back to at least the founding of London, the capital city, two thousand and more years past on the banks of that very river.
There was a relatively short period of time when the Thames did freeze in winter and England was much colder, this article talks about a chunky bit of architecture during that period.
The windows are discussed wrt their thermal effects, allowing the sun in to heat central stone during the day on one side of the building, likely with heavy curtains at night, with windows blocked internally and largely for show on the rear.
I was speaking with an architect a few months ago and dismayed to learn that they no longer bother designing for thermal management (relying on air-conditioning alone). They are fully focused on the aesthetic "integration" of the structure in the landscape. (I use quotes for the word "integration" because it implies a harmonious coalescing across domains, including temperature.) Their prior work beautifully incorporated passive heating/cooling, much to the benefit of the clients' health and happiness. Where did this architect lose the thread?
I've noticed in general a thorough dismissal of passive benefits. It seems that we are caught by a cultural need for immediacy. Thermal management, and particularly passive thermal management, pays immense dividends slowly, but it takes a greater intelligence or broader perspective for anyone to appreciate these advantages.
Those who sit still and think clearly see the advantages of passive benefits, and anyone who gardens or does systems design intrinsically observes the long-term flows and thus understands the passive benefits at play. But so many people – from practitioners like the architect to stakeholders like their clients – go through life wholly unaware of this goldmine that is right there in front of their imagination.
This just reminds me of a random discussion I had with a very close German friend.
He pointed out that Tado (who do smart radiator valves) noted from a study, which drew from their data, that the UK sucks at insulation, losing heat up to three times faster than other European neighbours[0].
Now it makes sense to me. I live in central continental Europe but spent a month or so in the UK a couple years ago, and one of my immediate impressions was how much colder it felt inside buildings. The buildings themselves seemed thinner and made of less dense materials as well.
I wonder if that correlates with the average age of houses. The UK has a lot of buildings that are well over 100 years old that can only be insulated by stuffing cavity walls full of an insulating material. My house is 126 years old, and despite my best efforts it's still terrible.
Modern insulation is really, really good, and modern heatpumps are very energy efficient and don't pollute your house with CO, CO2, and particulate matter like woodsmoke. Also, modern double- or triple-pane windows insulate much better than drafty Elizabethan windows. We live in a time of marvels.
You're missing out if you don't have such thick mass of warm brick/stone. If you only knew how great it is to sleep on top of it (my grandmother had similar to that in her house :)
Modern fire codes require large space between a stove and walls which is usually goes unused where it could have been really filled with such a thick brick structure with the smoke passage snaking through it like in Russian and German stoves. Or like this:
the modern way of doing that is ICF - insulated concrete forms.
I remember talking to a builder once who was building a house this way. He said the mass wasn't allowed to be advertised with an R-value since it wasn't actually insulation, but he said it was comparable to an R-50 house.
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.
Yep cheap energy and modern building techniques made us lose a lot of the common sense of yesterday.
Good thing initiatives like the passive house institute are bringing back some of these principles, you can easily cut a modern home heating/cooling needs by 70%+ by following simples rules
Passive house thinking comes from an era of peak oil concerns, no solar, and no heat pumps. None of those conditions holds anymore. Further, passive houses are notorious for overheating and because they’re so airtight they require expensive mechanical ventilation and make-up air systems unless you want indoor air pollution problems.
People building houses today are much better served by spending their money on solar + battery + heat pumps than going passive.
> Fireplaces were strategically arranged so minimal heat would be lost to the outer walls
I'm always a little confused by radiators placed underneath windows in modern buildings. I'm sure it evens out cold spots, but it sends a lot of heat right outside.
This was deliberate engineering to bring in fresh air. After the 1918 Flu, there was a desire for more fresh air inside homes. All of the apartments I lived in Chicago were built decades later, but the radiator layout persists.
Article[0] on it
I’ve heard a story, and I don’t know if it’s an urban legend, that steam heat became popular after the 1918 flu pandemic because it was going to force overheating of units and make people open their windows and let the bad air out.
I’ve never heard it put that way, but the flu pandemic had a huge impact on heating systems, because they actually changed the code requirements for heating systems when the pandemic was around, because they didn’t know what was causing this. They thought there was something in the air that was causing this. And so what they did is they started requiring buildings to be ventilated. Essentially, they changed the requirements for heating buildings so you had to maintain 70 degrees in the building with all the windows open in the sleeping rooms. So people see these great big huge radiators and think that that’s what they have to have in the house. Usually, the reason those radiators are so big is because they had to heat the house with windows open.
It stops drafts from the window before they reach occupants. Yes, it is less efficient in terms of total heat inside the structure, but its more effective at avoiding uncomfortably cold spots, which is (in most places at most times of year) more important, plus, the utility lost to the occupied under-window space is less than the utility that would be lost for the same space elsewhere; the window already limiting alternate uses.
I lived in a house for a bit with a bedroom was in the northeast corner of the house, and the radiator was on an inside wall. The only convenient spot for the bed was the exterior corner.
On more than one occasion, I found my bedsheets completely frosted stuck to the wall.
When the cold air coming from the window drops, it pushes the rising hot air out into the room. Overall loss of heat, but feels better for the human occupants long term.
I think a lot of those old central heat systems you couldn't actually control the heat, being able to lose a lot of heat to the window if you wanted was probably a feature. I was watching a video on old soviet blocks in cold areas and it sounded like it really sucked to live too close to the central heater and have to deal with super hot houses
Offices that use air handlers and VAVs also have narrow VAV zones along all perimeter windows. It’s for comfort, windows are where the most heat is lost/gained so heating or cooling those zones makes the space more comfortable for the people inside those areas.
Brits, Dutch, Belgium, Northern Germany. They all have this incredibly outdated building style that they refuse to change. Bricks with no insulation. I live 1000km to the south of them and it is pretty standard for us to have tripple pane windows and thick insulation on our houses. But they for some reason prefer to live in cold houses during the winter and overheated houses during the summer.
I have had multiple conversations with people who lived a while in that area. Rich, educated countries, modern economies, but they live like they are poor farmers in the 19th century.
It's an interesting article on this one particular mansion, but the idea that "the same tricks for more efficient heating can be used in modern designs" seems pretty silly.
We don't use fireplaces anymore (a major "trick" being to put them in the middle of the house rather than in the exterior walls), and while using large windows to capture sunlight and heat works great in the winter, it also leads to overheating in the summer and thus more energy for air conditioning.
> These are modest changes, imperceptible to most, and they won't enable us to forgo active heating and cooling entirely. But they do echo a way of thinking which, today, is oft ignored. Hardwick Hall was designed with Sun, season and temperature in mind.
Everyone I know who has built a house has thought very much about sun, season and temperature. This is very much a factor in determining the sizes and quantity of windows on south-facing vs. north-facing walls, for example.
Again, it's a very interesting article on this one particular castle, but the idea that it has something to teach modern architects and builders is pure fantasy. We're already well aware of all these factors and how they interact with materials and design.
> Everyone I know who has built a house has thought very much about sun, season and temperature.
I've lived in houses that certainly did not take into account sun, season and temperature. I learned a lot from that experience. My current house is optimized for it. I've learned a few more things about it, and could do better.
> the idea that it has something to teach modern architects and builders is pure fantasy
Not my experience with architects and builders.
For example, how many houses have a cupola? They're common on older homes, but non-existent on modern ones. What the roof does is accelerate the wind moving over the roof, then the air vents in the cupola let the wind through, which sucks the heat out of the attic.
Another design element is eaves. Eaves shade the house in summer and don't shade it in winter (for more heat gain). Eaves also keep the sides of the house dry, which means your siding and paint and window frames last a lot longer. Mine are 1.5 feet. Most houses around here have tiny or even non-existent eaves.
The advent of air-conditioning is when architects stopped paying attention to the sun.
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 homes, so their ability to influence the inclusion of some of these features are limited.
The industry is downstream of market demands. If customers aren't aware enough to demand smart things, builders will skip them to save money, or to optimize for more visible features. Same old story.
> while using large windows to capture sunlight and heat works great in the winter
That's what awnings (or solar overhangs, or light shelves) are for. You block the high/hot summer sun but let in the low/cool winter sun.
> the idea that it has something to teach modern architects and builders is pure fantasy
Isn't the idea of mcmansions that they co opt smart classic design ideas, but use them in a manner which doesn't let them fulfill their function purpose(skeuomorphism)? So someone certainly has some things to learn
> and while using large windows to capture sunlight and heat works great in the winter, it also leads to overheating in the summer and thus more energy for air conditioning.
A lot of contemporary energy-efficient designs slope the windows now such that light can enter in the winter but not the summer, but in the past this problem would have been remedied with awnings.
And if they are not used it's more of question of price and other available options and not "the modern architects forgot".
Making what's essentially "an insulated box" is far more universal climate-wise than most of the old methods, because what's good in summer (north-facing windows, good airflow, getting some cold from the ground) is terrible for winter and vice versa. And where it is useful, it IS used, just instead of fireplace having big thermal mass we have floor heating where the concrete floor is the heat storage (and sometimes extra tank of water)
And every method to make it "better" directly competes with "just buy more solar/battery to run heat pump cheaper.
>a major "trick" being to put them in the middle of the house rather than in the exterior wall
I vised Löwenburg in Kassel which has bedrooms with similar curtains around the bed. Much later (1891) and with other heating technology of note. I was intrigued by the fireplace design in the room immediately behind the bed. The open fire is backed by a huge granite block built into the wall. The room had a close connection to servant stairways directly down to the exterior.
The guide describe the otherwise plain room as a dressing room. It looked like a convenient place to store a lot of firewood to stoke the fireplace attached to the bed behind it to me.
> Scandinavian cabins, despite lacking modern insulation, maintain warmth in sub-zero temperatures. This video explores centuries-old building techniques, comparing their performance against modern homes. Discover the surprising physics principles behind their resilience and energy efficiency.
I live not far from Hardwick Hall, drive past it frequently, and have visited it a few times. Learned a lot of of new stuff about it from this article, thanks.
The big about textiles (curtains and bed fabric) functioning as insulation gave me flashbacks to my dad repeatedly complaining over the past decade about a couple small boxes of my stuff taking up space he "needs" in his 700 sqft attic.
I told him, "What's the big deal? It's free insulation during brutal north Texas summers. It's as good as vermiculite insulation minus the asbestos contamination!"
I only put about as much rigor into this as reddit PC builders making untested "gut calls" about thermodynamics, and I was mostly just being a smartass, but it's nice to see I had the same idea as English nobility who comfortably survived winters before the invention of HVAC as we know it.
Nice to see some proof I'm not completely full of crap.
I envision even simpler and more practical thing, under-the-floor heating with addition of disposal water.
Me and my wife are taking shower daily, hers being hotter than mine (apparently that's common difference between female & male).
Every time, I am thinking that so much heat is going down the drain as waste, why not circulate this under the bathroom floor until it cools down.
Since we have a tub, I usually close the drain, sit/stand on a bench above the tub, rinse thoroughly at the end, keeping hot water afloat for next 20 minutes.
Since tub itself absorbs the heat, even after I open the drain and let go all the water, tub itself stays warmy for an hour or so.
A great example is the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. At first glance, the building seems to be a giant rectangular box made of glass. Hardly ideal in the long, hot Arkansas summers.
It’s not the truth, though. In reality, the building is said to be highly efficient and was the first Federal building to be LEED certified. Amazing.
I guess we’ve learned a few things over the years.
Or go solar with a battery, or just have a massive battery hooked into your distribution panel and leave the 19th century heating hacks in the 19th century. Optimize what you need for today, not whatever was state of the art 200 years ago. An electric space heater running continuously is enough in an emergency.
If it's really cold outside, an electric heater isn't going to do much if your house doesn't have good insulation. It'll be cranking away on high 24/7 and the room will still be cold. Building direction, window choice, room design, etc all contribute to the overall thermal efficiency so that the space heater can be effective.
> An electric space heater running continuously is enough in an emergency.
Yeah, massive battery and massive solar install might let it run continuously… even in a small well insulated house that’s gonna be using a lot of power to heat a room or two.
I'm pretty sure humans understood taking advantage of sunlight to warm structures since the earliest structures. Most animals understand the sunlight/shade difference. The aztecs, egyptians, etc..
Apropos the information box, I don’t believe that the European colonisation of the New World was a cause of the Little Ice Age. A claim that bold should really show it’s workings.
> 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 being only 9% of the world population, having a very cool climate in comparison to India and similar countries, and being among the richest regions in the world.
Even parts of the US that have AC standard have learned to lean on it so hard that they've lost architectural features which, 50-100 years ago, kept a house cooler in Summer.
I once lived in a rental house in a "historical" neighborhood (on US timelines, not European) in a big city, and most of the houses had porches on two or three sides, depending on the cardinal orientation. These kept sunlight from falling directly on main body of the house, and strategically placed windows let you open two or three and get a breeze through the whole house.
We learned this visiting a neighbor who owned their home. The rental was not as well-maintained: some of the window frames had been painted shut over decades of touchups, but we never thought much of it. The day we jimmied them open and experienced a true cross-breeze through the living room was a HUGE "Aha!" moment.
Setting aside porches, even simple features like awnings above windows (esp. second-story windows) have fallen out of fashion, but they can reduce the demand on indoor AC significantly. They save money, but people think they look old-fashioned or something like that.
Note that the Grauniad figures include some very unusual heat waves. There's no way the normal average could be a lot higher in years that were a lot colder.
I live in Europe. My house gets too warm maybe 1 week of the year. I bought a big floor standing fan and it fixed that.
30 degrees Centigrade is exceptional here.
Whereas in other parts of Europe it gets much hotter. Probably best not to generalise over a whole continent that covers 36 degrees of latitude (more than the contiguous 48 states of the US, at about 25 degrees), and goes from islands sat in the Gulf Stream to land sat next to an even larger land mass.
>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,
The times they are a-changing. Every house on my 21 year old estate came with ac. I'd assume the same for newer constructions.
People rarely use it due to the price of electricity. Temps get well over 30C for a couple of weeks in august.
Most of the tricks seem like they'd work in the cooling direction too. They amount to insulation and thermal mass. You would need AC to actually lower the temperature, but those improvements would let you run the cooling on a lower duty cycle.
0xbadcafebee|1 month ago
You're better served by looking to 19th century lower and middle class architecture. Right before air conditioning, but with relatively modern designs using modern building materials and practices ("insulation" (horsehair and newspaper), fireplaces/stoves, corridors with doors to separate cold rooms from hot ones, windows designed to allow cross-breezes, covered porches to provide shade in summer, etc). Right before air conditioning came in, we had pretty much gotten to the peak of design that used natural forms of temperature regulation. Some designs even created mini greenhouses of glass, with half the wall mounted with earth, for thermal regulation as well as solar heating. The only better passive methods invented since then is geothermal.
The peak of winter heat management were the pechka, Russian rocket stoves built into literal tons of masonry, for the most thermal mass possible. You'd heat it up once with a small amount of wood and it warms the house the whole day. They were so big you could sleep on top of it.
expedition32|1 month ago
It was so bad that even rich people had to admit that the country had become an embarrassment.
pavel_lishin|1 month ago
It immediately brings to mind when we had insulation blown into our walls, and the guy doing the work showing us the shredded newspaper treated with borax, and explaining how the borax made it fire-resistant.
yborg|1 month ago
bluGill|1 month ago
fuzztester|1 month ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Baker
ynac|1 month ago
maccard|1 month ago
mikestew|1 month ago
mlhpdx|1 month ago
realusername|1 month ago
Open floor plans also destroy the efficiency as the heat goes up which made your already inefficient heating even worse.
Combine both together and you probably have 5% efficiency.
PunchyHamster|1 month ago
Old school version of that were masonry stoves that come with ton+ of mass for the bricks and smoke being routed all over (often including a place to sleep) to take as much heat as possible from it.
If I had money for that I'd put a big hot water tank for buffer, heat it normally with heat pump, and just had emergency water-sheathed fireplate, with big buffer you can just fire it up once and have tank slowly give the heat back to the building. Or fire it up at the coldest days to save some heat pump power in days where there is barely any solar.
asdff|1 month ago
I assume most decorative fireplaces on the other hand are not built to heat the house.
dyauspitr|1 month ago
klondike_klive|1 month ago
(It feels like it's getting warmer - may all be wishful thinking though, I haven't taken any measurements!)
DoctorOetker|1 month ago
jimnotgym|1 month ago
> Pretty much all the fireplaces I see are also built on the central spine of the building, meaning not much heat would be lost to the windows or exterior wall.
Or maybe because, as the first half of the article say, it is because the outside walls have nowhere to put a fireplace, because they are covered in windows?
> he told me it can feel around 10C (18F) warmer inside on a cold winter's day. Other, typical Elizabethan houses, he estimates, would have only feel 2-3C (3.6-5.4F) warmer.
It 'feels' warmer...he 'estimates'. Nice way to do science
> Since it's winter, and cold, I move my desk to a south-eastern window. It brightens the mornings and if I wear another layer, I find I can lower the thermostat by 2C (3.6F).
More good science, change two variables but attribute the effect to only one of them. If I wear another layer of clothing, move my desk to the basement, sacrifice a goat, speak in tongues and draw a pentacle on the floor, I can turn the thermostat down 2 degrees too.
But let's start at the top
>England's longest river was usually flowing freely
Then list lots of evidence that it was not at all unusual for it to freeze at the time.
Great work
defrost|1 month ago
The article takes a long view of time, stretching back to at least the founding of London, the capital city, two thousand and more years past on the banks of that very river.
There was a relatively short period of time when the Thames did freeze in winter and England was much colder, this article talks about a chunky bit of architecture during that period.
The windows are discussed wrt their thermal effects, allowing the sun in to heat central stone during the day on one side of the building, likely with heavy curtains at night, with windows blocked internally and largely for show on the rear.
pinnochio|1 month ago
You always this cranky and uncharitable?
riazrizvi|1 month ago
https://youtu.be/puzxeIvpgwg
https://youtu.be/SrC3wms8pQ8
arthurofbabylon|1 month ago
I've noticed in general a thorough dismissal of passive benefits. It seems that we are caught by a cultural need for immediacy. Thermal management, and particularly passive thermal management, pays immense dividends slowly, but it takes a greater intelligence or broader perspective for anyone to appreciate these advantages.
Those who sit still and think clearly see the advantages of passive benefits, and anyone who gardens or does systems design intrinsically observes the long-term flows and thus understands the passive benefits at play. But so many people – from practitioners like the architect to stakeholders like their clients – go through life wholly unaware of this goldmine that is right there in front of their imagination.
bhickey|1 month ago
I lived in an almost passive house for about a year. When the HVAC system stopped working* in July, I didn't notice until the middle of November.
* Air handler was running, compressor was off.
karim79|1 month ago
He pointed out that Tado (who do smart radiator valves) noted from a study, which drew from their data, that the UK sucks at insulation, losing heat up to three times faster than other European neighbours[0].
[0] https://www.tado.com/en-gb/press/uk-homes-losing-heat-up-to-...
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated nor am I a customer of Tado. Also, I'm British and I just felt like commenting here because it felt relevant.
keiferski|1 month ago
onion2k|1 month ago
JohnCClarke|1 month ago
loeg|1 month ago
trhway|1 month ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_stove
Modern fire codes require large space between a stove and walls which is usually goes unused where it could have been really filled with such a thick brick structure with the smoke passage snaking through it like in Russian and German stoves. Or like this:
https://www.mha-net.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/05...
m463|1 month ago
I remember talking to a builder once who was building a house this way. He said the mass wasn't allowed to be advertised with an R-value since it wasn't actually insulation, but he said it was comparable to an R-50 house.
ggm|1 month ago
mmaunder|1 month ago
And here's more info on The Little Ice Age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
Debatable as to whether solar activity was a contributor to The Little Ice Age.
pipes|1 month ago
lm28469|1 month ago
Good thing initiatives like the passive house institute are bringing back some of these principles, you can easily cut a modern home heating/cooling needs by 70%+ by following simples rules
vosper|1 month ago
People building houses today are much better served by spending their money on solar + battery + heat pumps than going passive.
loeg|1 month ago
xnx|1 month ago
I'm always a little confused by radiators placed underneath windows in modern buildings. I'm sure it evens out cold spots, but it sends a lot of heat right outside.
3eb7988a1663|1 month ago
Article[0] on it
[0] https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/a-history-of-radiators-...Edit: switched out to different article focused on Chicago
dragonwriter|1 month ago
zdragnar|1 month ago
On more than one occasion, I found my bedsheets completely frosted stuck to the wall.
learn_more|1 month ago
buu709|1 month ago
thatguy0900|1 month ago
quickthrowman|1 month ago
cwillu|1 month ago
rapsey|1 month ago
I have had multiple conversations with people who lived a while in that area. Rich, educated countries, modern economies, but they live like they are poor farmers in the 19th century.
asplake|1 month ago
Glawen|1 month ago
crazygringo|1 month ago
We don't use fireplaces anymore (a major "trick" being to put them in the middle of the house rather than in the exterior walls), and while using large windows to capture sunlight and heat works great in the winter, it also leads to overheating in the summer and thus more energy for air conditioning.
> These are modest changes, imperceptible to most, and they won't enable us to forgo active heating and cooling entirely. But they do echo a way of thinking which, today, is oft ignored. Hardwick Hall was designed with Sun, season and temperature in mind.
Everyone I know who has built a house has thought very much about sun, season and temperature. This is very much a factor in determining the sizes and quantity of windows on south-facing vs. north-facing walls, for example.
Again, it's a very interesting article on this one particular castle, but the idea that it has something to teach modern architects and builders is pure fantasy. We're already well aware of all these factors and how they interact with materials and design.
WalterBright|1 month ago
I've lived in houses that certainly did not take into account sun, season and temperature. I learned a lot from that experience. My current house is optimized for it. I've learned a few more things about it, and could do better.
> the idea that it has something to teach modern architects and builders is pure fantasy
Not my experience with architects and builders.
For example, how many houses have a cupola? They're common on older homes, but non-existent on modern ones. What the roof does is accelerate the wind moving over the roof, then the air vents in the cupola let the wind through, which sucks the heat out of the attic.
Another design element is eaves. Eaves shade the house in summer and don't shade it in winter (for more heat gain). Eaves also keep the sides of the house dry, which means your siding and paint and window frames last a lot longer. Mine are 1.5 feet. Most houses around here have tiny or even non-existent eaves.
The advent of air-conditioning is when architects stopped paying attention to the sun.
quesera|1 month ago
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 homes, so their ability to influence the inclusion of some of these features are limited.
The industry is downstream of market demands. If customers aren't aware enough to demand smart things, builders will skip them to save money, or to optimize for more visible features. Same old story.
IncreasePosts|1 month ago
That's what awnings (or solar overhangs, or light shelves) are for. You block the high/hot summer sun but let in the low/cool winter sun.
> the idea that it has something to teach modern architects and builders is pure fantasy
Isn't the idea of mcmansions that they co opt smart classic design ideas, but use them in a manner which doesn't let them fulfill their function purpose(skeuomorphism)? So someone certainly has some things to learn
lurk2|1 month ago
A lot of contemporary energy-efficient designs slope the windows now such that light can enter in the winter but not the summer, but in the past this problem would have been remedied with awnings.
PunchyHamster|1 month ago
Making what's essentially "an insulated box" is far more universal climate-wise than most of the old methods, because what's good in summer (north-facing windows, good airflow, getting some cold from the ground) is terrible for winter and vice versa. And where it is useful, it IS used, just instead of fireplace having big thermal mass we have floor heating where the concrete floor is the heat storage (and sometimes extra tank of water)
And every method to make it "better" directly competes with "just buy more solar/battery to run heat pump cheaper.
interloxia|1 month ago
I vised Löwenburg in Kassel which has bedrooms with similar curtains around the bed. Much later (1891) and with other heating technology of note. I was intrigued by the fireplace design in the room immediately behind the bed. The open fire is backed by a huge granite block built into the wall. The room had a close connection to servant stairways directly down to the exterior.
The guide describe the otherwise plain room as a dressing room. It looked like a convenient place to store a lot of firewood to stoke the fireplace attached to the bed behind it to me.
dpark|1 month ago
thangalin|1 month ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVqwiMtoDhk
asplake|1 month ago
usrusr|1 month ago
Someone appears to have had a bit of fun being unspecific
president_zippy|1 month ago
I told him, "What's the big deal? It's free insulation during brutal north Texas summers. It's as good as vermiculite insulation minus the asbestos contamination!"
I only put about as much rigor into this as reddit PC builders making untested "gut calls" about thermodynamics, and I was mostly just being a smartass, but it's nice to see I had the same idea as English nobility who comfortably survived winters before the invention of HVAC as we know it.
Nice to see some proof I'm not completely full of crap.
pvtmert|1 month ago
Me and my wife are taking shower daily, hers being hotter than mine (apparently that's common difference between female & male).
Every time, I am thinking that so much heat is going down the drain as waste, why not circulate this under the bathroom floor until it cools down.
Since we have a tub, I usually close the drain, sit/stand on a bench above the tub, rinse thoroughly at the end, keeping hot water afloat for next 20 minutes.
Since tub itself absorbs the heat, even after I open the drain and let go all the water, tub itself stays warmy for an hour or so.
RickJWagner|1 month ago
A great example is the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. At first glance, the building seems to be a giant rectangular box made of glass. Hardly ideal in the long, hot Arkansas summers.
It’s not the truth, though. In reality, the building is said to be highly efficient and was the first Federal building to be LEED certified. Amazing.
I guess we’ve learned a few things over the years.
https://www.clintonlibrary.gov/about-us/leed-certified-build...
1970-01-01|1 month ago
0xbadcafebee|1 month ago
mrexroad|1 month ago
Yeah, massive battery and massive solar install might let it run continuously… even in a small well insulated house that’s gonna be using a lot of power to heat a room or two.
candiddevmike|1 month ago
halls-940|1 month ago
hardlianotion|1 month ago
teiferer|1 month ago
Point of a thermostat is to not have to do this.
Requires a well calibrated heating system though, depending on outside temperature.
rappatic|1 month ago
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 being only 9% of the world population, having a very cool climate in comparison to India and similar countries, and being among the richest regions in the world.
chao-|1 month ago
I once lived in a rental house in a "historical" neighborhood (on US timelines, not European) in a big city, and most of the houses had porches on two or three sides, depending on the cardinal orientation. These kept sunlight from falling directly on main body of the house, and strategically placed windows let you open two or three and get a breeze through the whole house.
We learned this visiting a neighbor who owned their home. The rental was not as well-maintained: some of the window frames had been painted shut over decades of touchups, but we never thought much of it. The day we jimmied them open and experienced a true cross-breeze through the living room was a HUGE "Aha!" moment.
Setting aside porches, even simple features like awnings above windows (esp. second-story windows) have fallen out of fashion, but they can reduce the demand on indoor AC significantly. They save money, but people think they look old-fashioned or something like that.
peterfirefly|1 month ago
Extremely doubtful. Even Teh Grauniad disagrees.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/17/human-ma...
Note that the Grauniad figures include some very unusual heat waves. There's no way the normal average could be a lot higher in years that were a lot colder.
jimnotgym|1 month ago
30 degrees Centigrade is exceptional here.
Whereas in other parts of Europe it gets much hotter. Probably best not to generalise over a whole continent that covers 36 degrees of latitude (more than the contiguous 48 states of the US, at about 25 degrees), and goes from islands sat in the Gulf Stream to land sat next to an even larger land mass.
Ylpertnodi|1 month ago
>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,
The times they are a-changing. Every house on my 21 year old estate came with ac. I'd assume the same for newer constructions. People rarely use it due to the price of electricity. Temps get well over 30C for a couple of weeks in august.
idle_zealot|1 month ago
edm0nd|1 month ago
vondur|1 month ago
solidsnack9000|1 month ago
MORPHOICES|1 month ago
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hasanabi|1 month ago
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