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Comment by fnbr | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I find that people spend the least amount of money on insulation/heat that they can. I’m from Edmonton, and the coldest I’ve ever been was the winter when I lived in London, UK, as their insulation sucks and their heating sucks. In Edmonton, that’s not possible, because you have a few days of -40C weather annually, so your pipes will freeze without proper insulation (and you’ll die).

Now, it’s not comfortable living through -40C weather, but it’s as cold inside as -5C in the UK (outside it’s way, way worse, of course).

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I find it cooler indoors in New Zealand during the winter than I did in the UK for this reason. NZ pretends it’s always warm and has little home insulation, or none in my house, except the ceiling which I did. New Zealand has very poor housing.

I found a week-long business trip to South Island in the winter terribly cold.

Going from 30°C weather to 12°C isn't a great start, but then the otherwise-decent hotel had single glazed windows, which the maid would open every morning. The only heater in the room was an electric resistance one attached to the wall.

In offices, most of the foreigners on the trip were wearing coats and other extra layers.

Young people walking around seemed to be happy in shorts and t-shirt. My conclusion was that New Zealanders are tough, outdoors people, and haven't upgraded their building insulation regulations from whatever they inherited from Britain.

We're not that tough. Any house built in the past 15 years must meet the newer regulations of double-glazing and roof,wall,floor insulation. There are plenty of older properties without any of these standards and these are terrible and are also probably the most likely to be Holiday homes or AirBnBs, but any houses that are tenanted now need to be upgraded to meet minimum standards.

Most private houses also have efficient heat-pumps in at least one room, I could never work out why we still use aluminum window frames though over normal uPVC, which are still not even an option in most new builds.

Personally I would ban resistive heating, they are generally in lower cost rentals, student properties etc and cost a lot for the tenant to use especially as these tenants are generally at the poorer side of the fence.

Stayed in some really cold crappy holiday homes in the south island one we had to leave the electric stove/oven on full to get it to bearable!

>Personally I would ban resistive heating, they are generally in lower cost rentals, student properties etc and cost a lot for the tenant to use especially as these tenants are generally at the poorer side of the fence.

You mean the radiant / bar heater type ones? I cannot agree with this, while I agree that they're expensive to run and inefficient for heating rooms / whole house, they do work well if you use them to directly heat only the part of the room you're in.

I've lived in old houses where the ceilings are too high to effectively heat via convection (e.g. a modern 5x5x2.4 room is 60m^3 volume, while an old house with the same width and length but 3.6 metre ceilings is 90m^3 of volume to heat - combine that with inferior ceiling insulation common in old houses and the fact that hot air rises, the space often cools faster than the convection heater can keep up) and there was no natural gas service, so we just had to sit in front of radiant heaters.

Aluminum window frame is really awful. Why we use the material that used for heatsink to insulate?

Apparently Al frames have been improved over the years as well.

A friend said the same about South Africa. It's so rarely cold, that when it is cold, it's colder than London.

As someone who grew up in South Africa I can confirm it. I grew up in the north of the country where in winter it can dip to just below freezing during the night and early morning. It would be back up to 16 degrees at lunchtime though.

I now live in the U.K. and although house quality and insulation is appalling compared to other places it is still infinitely warmer here in the middle of winter than in South Africa.

Coldest I have ever been was going back to visit family during winter there. My wife, who is from Germany and used to -5 to -10 in winter, would take a lot of persuading to visit South Africa in the middle of winter again.

Was in South Africa in Winter. Your friend is right. Some AirBnBs were so cold, you just wanted to stay in bed and never get up. But the people were amazing, and the food, and the nature.

The difference there is the humidity making you feel cold.

I live in the Yukon where -40C is the standard daytime temp for months, and I'm perfectly happy/used to it.

I felt cold to my bones in the UK.

The comment isn’t about the temps outside, it’s inside the house. The point was that in really cold places people have to have good heating and insulation so the house feels better than places with more mild winters.

The humidity is still a big factor inside, and it's why you feel colder than in places with low humidity.

Odd you were downvoted down much for mentioning that humidity impacts how we feel temperatures..

Humid -40C air becomes very dry +20C air when it gets inside a heated house.

Saturated vapour density, the basis of relative humidity, about doubles every 10C.

Have you ever experienced Humid -40C air? It doesn't happen.

I've had very humid -25C air in Alaska, and wearing literally everything I own (which is perfect at -48C), I was freezing cold for the entire day, even when running, snowboarding, jumping up and down and beating my chest.

> Have you ever experienced Humid -40C air? It doesn't happen.

> I've had very humid -25C air in Alaska

You haven't had very humid -25C air, in an absolute sense. Take a look at a vapour pressure calculator (https://www.omnicalculator.com/chemistry/vapour-pressure-of-...): the vapour pressure of water at -25C is about 63 Pa, but about 13 Pascals at -40C. The difference of 50 Pa is trivial compared to the ~100,000 Pa pressure of air at sea level. Once you're below 0C, there just isn't enough water around in a vapour (or suspended) phase to have much impact.

A Globe and Mail article from 2016 discussed this phenomenon (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/fitn...). Its conclusions were still tentative, but the strongest correlate of the effect seemed to be cloud cover, where bright sunlight felt warmer despite colder air temperatures.

Thing is, it's almost always close to 100 % humidity when it's cold, since the air can hold so little vapor.

I don't think it is, unless temperature stays constant or there is incoming source of water vapor. It reaches 100% when it is coldest in the night and all water deposits down as frost (to provide exercise to people parking outside), then it warms up and the air is dryer. Bigger the temp swings drier the air outside.

Applies to continental climate though, when you are near sea you probably have air constantly replaced with humid air.

For indoor humidity, it's the same for -25C weather as for -40C. Its going to be dry when heated up.

How do you folks in the Yukon manage air humidity inside your houses during the winter?

I would think that by default, the indoor heated air would be so dry that it would cause havoc on your sinuses.

Many, many people struggle with dry and cracked skin (hands, face), blood noses, etc.

For me personally I do notice it whenever I leave and come back, though I seem to adjust OK. I use moisturizer a lot.

Not from there, but a humidifier?

My grandma always had a little thing filled with water hanging on the radiator during winter.

Agree. Humidity and altitude play a huge role in how cold it feels (and in how effective the cold is - specific heat).

I guess most people's experience of living in London is because they lived in shitty rented accommodation. Most houses in London were built before the 1970s. Being rented would mean they they would be less likely to have double-glazing retro-fitted or insulation improved because the landlord wouldn't give a shit.

I don't know what the rules are in London, but in Chicago landlords are responsible for paying for heating. An interesting side effect is that even crappy old buildings have triple paned windows and super efficient heaters.

Strange, I never heard of any place where the renter doesn't pay for the heating. Doesn't seem fair to make the landlord pay for it.

It's probably not fair, but the side effect of it is that people don't freeze in their homes, and heating can be more efficient because they can use whole building systems.

And at the end of the day, the tenants basically pay for it anyway as part of their rent. It's just spread out more.

yes, but people's preferences can vary. e.g. I can't stand it being less than 77 F inside, while others will be happy with 64 F. I know my electricity/heat bill is always significantly higher than others in the Winter.

Coldest winter of my life was near London. Heater was wired to cheap middle of the night electricity so you had to plan a day ahead to have hot water or heat. Friends had to go to hardware store to get tokens to feed their rental heaters. Ran out at night? Put on a extra blanket and get there early the next day.

I think it's that most rented accommodation in areas desirable for people like software developers or foreigners new to the city is as you describe.

Further out, or in less trendy areas, there may well be a different mix of old/new council/private-built buildings. I lived in a wonderful 1930s apartment block (good double glazing, shared building heating system etc) and a decent 1970s council-built house.

I also lived in a crappy 1960s council flat (single glazed aluminium framed windows) and an 1900-ish house-illegally-turned-into-flats (single glazed, wooden sash windows).

Oh, definitely. I lived in university accommodations that were awful. The residents the year after me sued the university as the residence wasn’t inhabitable (black mold).

Oh my, London was OK, but my SF appartement was freezing cold during the winter and horribly hot during the summer. And of course no AC and a shitty heater.

SF exists, for better or worse, in a Goldilocks zone where mediocre housing and clothing will still suffice for the climate. It gets cold, but rarely deadly cold. It gets hot, but rarely deadly hot. It gets wet, but mostly via fog. It gets windy, but not to hurricane force. Visitors regularly get faked out by the advertised mild weather and get the experience of a windy, cold grey SF summer in shorts - which is survivable but unpleasant. You can't last the entire year that way - rough sleepers do die from exposure in the harshest weeks - but it's "enough" to have some enclosure and warm socks in the winter and some ventilation for the fall heat waves.

And the constant backdrop of humidity can't be overemphasized in why it's unpleasant. Extreme dry temperatures kill you, mild wet ones make you feel dead.

This may also explain the age and quality of its housing stock, which is often a combination of moldy and drafty. There isn't an incentive pushing regulation further, so the landowners have their pick of NIMBY policies that keep old stock in the mix.

I read about poor insulation a lot but is insulation practical or worth it in areas like South Asia where the humidity is on average 40-80% RH.

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