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Comment by heffer | Hacker News Reader

This is true in Germany, where most in-home heating systems use radiant heat. I have since moved to Canada and my house uses forced air and a gas furnace. I can still feel cold at 21.5°C in my forced air heated house which I never did in Germany. Radiant heat does a much better job of heating the things in your house than forced air will. Heating things, and not just the air, is what has them store that warmth across Stoßlüften-Sessions. So technically, Stoßlüften works well with radiant heated homes, less so with forced air heated homes.

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That's true! I was also thinking about how German houses also tend to have relatively thick and non-wooden walls (since compared to the US, there's no significant earthquake risk).

That adds a lot of thermal mass as well.

Is it much more likely that there is a difference in how your thermostat is placed or there was better insulation (so that heat ends up more even).

Over the past few years I've been working on improving the thermal efficiency of our house, which has mainly been strategic air sealing / adding insulation.

One thing I've definitely noticed is that as I improve the insulation in one area of the house, other areas will get colder.

The reasoning is that the worst insulated spots in my house were near to the thermostat. Now they they can maintain heat decently, the further way areas are allowed to cool more before the heat kicks on.

The first tool someone should buy when investigating the thermal efficiency of their house is one of the cheap ($30- $50 if I remember right) infrared thermometers.

The temperature of your house is likely 5-10F off from what your thermostat claims, particularly the further you get from the thermostat.

Exactly, you can even get infrared thermometers for less now that they are being used to take people's temperatures when they enter a business.

Meanwhile, I can feel an outside gust of cold wind from the middle of my home. I don’t begin to know where to start.

The biggest issue in my house ended up being that the builders didn't bother to insulate or air-seal the subfloor areas (the space between the floor of one level and the ceiling of the level below).

Found that out the hard way when three years ago during our first Winter here, the water to the kitchen was frozen for most of the month of January. Thankfully our house has PEX piping, so no burst pipes for us.

Sealing and insulating those areas has made a tremendous difference, even in the interior areas of the house. Since the subfloor is wide open, a cold breeze from one spot can suck the heat out of the entire floor with surprising effectiveness.

Perhaps I misunderstood your description of subfloor, but I don’t think it’s common anywhere to insulate between interior floors or walls.

I mean the exterior walls of our house were completely uninsulated in the subfloor area.

You're correct that it doesn't make sense to insulate between floors, but you do need to insulate the entire exterior wall area, which includes the wall space between floors.

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