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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

During winter I never heat my home above 18C, so I never use any heating. My computer and I are the only sources of heat and it's enough (not to mention the fridge, etc). If it goes below 16 I do some pushups and dress accordingly. If the bed is really cold, I just use a hot-water bag.

I like the cold.

To be honest, I'm also wondering if getting used to the cold might result in some form of slight weight loss, since your body would naturally burn additional calories to maintain a normal body temperature, but it's just a guess.

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Depending on where you live this can ruin your apt/house and accelerate growth of mold because the humidity will be so high. At least you have to vent regulary (which might be challenging as you can't heat up fast if you don't do any extra heating).

Just saying, I have seen it happening as a tenant wanted to save on heating costs...

I can confirm, I live in a very humid city but I really like to sleep in a cold bedroom. However when indoor temperature dropped to below 17°C I had to heat it up back to 18-19°C because mold started growing near the windows. Unfortunately the house is very badly isolated so the temperature near the windows is always way lower than in the rest of the room.

That's fine, except that the humidity in your house must be insane. I see it a lot in some British houses, where people either don't have heating on or run it very rarely - everything has this damp, musky smell of mildew. It's gross frankly. And the only way to fix it is to either run a powerful dehumidifier almost non-stop(not cheap, but at least you can keep the house cold if you want to), or....put the heating on. Opening the windows does nothing if the humidity outside is also pretty high.

We keep our house at 17C/62F. I also have wood instruments, some quite expensive, for which I track humidity with a slight bit of obsession. I say “slight bit” because in the Seattle area the indoor humidity of our house rarely exceeds 50%, usually 35-45% in winter. That’s about perfect for wood instruments, and it rarely varies much, so no need to get too obsessive about it. And our house doesn’t have a mold problem.

Point is, depends on where one lives, I guess. It’s odd that you call out Britain, as that’s about the same latitude and same rainy winter weather as Seattle, but our humidity stays within a reasonable range.

Well, in my British home I have one unheated(but closed, with proper double glazed windows) room - without heating, humidity is pretty much constantly at 85-90% and windows are constantly fogged up. It needs constant heating every day to stay at that usual 40-50% humidity.

I wish people who told stories like this gave a little more context. Like where do you live? How chold does it get? Would you say your home is well insulated? Do you live in an apartment?

Top post in this thread is someone claiming they used only the coldest water to shower for 11 years. Where I live, in the winter, the water is barely above freezing, it hurts. I've read that 70f showers are cold enough for health benefits. 70f does not hurt.

>I'm also wondering if getting used to the cold might result in some form of slight weight loss

Your body burns calories to keep its temperature - 36.6C. Another trick to force your body to burn calories is to drink cold water.

Note that "burn calories" in this context equates to a pretty negligable number, iirc it's ~25 calories per litre of ice water. You can make the same number with a long stair journey or 3 minutes on your bike.

lets say you drink a liter of 16.6C water per day. your body will heat 365 litres of water to 36.6C. Energy needed is (36.6 - 16.6) * 4200 * 365 = 30 660 000 joules ~= 7328kcal

its 2-week of intensive workouts for free.

Afaik, you will store fat faster and you will be be hungry. So despite burning more calories, cold swimming is supposed to make you more likely to gain weight.

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