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Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

> Also you may risk giving more people diseases

This is an old wife's tale. Especially at 18C. No one is going to be getting diseases.

I think when you're calling bullshit, in order for it not to become a he-said, she-said situation, you should provide any sort of source.

If you sit still at 18°C, working on a computer, you'll get very cold before the ~3h of work in the morning is over if you don't also adjust your clothing. I don't find it such a leap to assume this body temperature change reduces your immune system, but then I don't really know. I'd be interested in the answer, but at this point OP's argument makes more sense to me than yours and neither is backed up with links so...

> if you don't also adjust your clothing

That's the thing though. If you live in an area where heating is required in the winter, you definitely have the necessary clothing to get through a period of 18 °C in your home.

You could take the terrible example we live by here in New Zealand. We pretend it doesn’t get cold, have poorly insulated and rather damp houses and just suffer through it. An inside temperature of 18 in midwinter sounds lovely. We also lack good wardrobes, but that might just be me.

NZ housing stock is truly atrocious. I knew it was bad but didn't appreciate how bad until living in the UK and going through winters sometimes without even needing to use heating (granted in apartments in that situation). Double glazing being near universal compared to pathetic aluminium frames are a major difference and leaky buildings top it off.

Looked at emigrating to NZ shortly after the kids were born - so many friends had.

I was shocked by the housing situation, prices were going crazy sure, that’s to be expected, but the actual quality of the housing was also terrible, and there wasn’t any cultural awareness of how bad they were

Didn’t move in the end, mainly because we wouldn’t have the money for the kids to see grandparents. Still not sure it was the right decision.

Any moves to tighten up building regulation are derided as red tape, nanny state etc. It’s amazing how much we undermine ourselves.

I considered NZ as well but the weather looks pretty terrible in NZ (maybe slightly better than the UK), windy and rainy.

House prices weren't too bad but quality wise they weren't great. I can't say they were much worse from London tbh (but it may be more related to how everything is expensive in London, outside of London house quality is way better).

Also taxes are pretty bad.

I'm completely appalled at how they're dealing with COVID so I'm glad I kept away from NZ and AU

Not sure about the weather comparison with the UK - its a lot wetter but the weather is more tropical (ie we get the rain in massive downpours, not drizzle).

House prices are very very high relative to wages and the quality is deeply average. Comparing house prices to London is not very logical, as the wages are nowhere near the same.

Dealing with covid - compare the death rate to pretty much anywhere. That was the point and what we wanted.

I grew up, and spent most of my life in Canada. I moved to Australia in my 30's. I have to say, I have never had a more uncomfortable winter than my first year here. I was cold all the time. Down to my bones cold. I hated it.

I eventually found a house that had decent insulation, and since then I've never let it get cold in my place. I've got solar, and I keep the heat cranked.

Even with more layers 18°C is low enough to impact joint movement which makes it difficult, even in healthy young people, to type on a keyboard. Similar to how summer heat without A/C interferes with concentration. Brave personal sacrifices to save the planet.

Indeed. There's no way I can work at 18°C. Four layers of shirts plus wrist warmers won't be enough to keep my fingers flexible on the keyboard if I sit still and code.

Edit: and I know this because I start the workday at 17°C in winter months. I live in an old building with poor-ish window insulation so I turn off heating in most rooms for the night, and in the bedroom for the day to conserve energy.

Code on a laptop and mine verium on it too (or whatever, 'compile') + an incandescent bulb aimed at your head is a decent amount of mitigation for it being 17-18C.

During the cold snap where it was below -15C during the night in the southern US last year I did exactly what i specified, and i didn't bother using my central heat. I haven't used central heat at all for 2 years. I do have mini split air systems, but at -15C they spend more time defrosting than heating, so the mitigation was to use lots of blankets in the bedrooms and turn the minisplits to heat at about 6AM to take the chill out for the morning routines, but shut them off at 10PM. There's no sense in wasting heat defrosting on "less efficient" heat pumps.

for perspective it's about 19C(66.2F) and i'm wearing shorts and a short sleeve shirt, indoors. One other thing that may not be true everywhere is i run de-humidifiers nearly year round, so that does dump about 800-1000W in the air when they're actively removing moisture, so your mileage may vary.

> During the cold snap where it was below -15C during the night [...] and i didn't bother using my central heat. I haven't used central heat at all for 2 years. [...] i'm wearing shorts and a short sleeve shirt, indoors

Yeah something doesn't add up here. Unless that lamp has a crazy wattage and you look down at this "mining" laptop on your lap for 8 hours a day (no desk, all heat going to legs, wrists, and hands), I don't really see this being realistic.

75W halogen, but my laptop can dissipate 170W. As long as you don't have fans blowing air around/over you, it's fine. your basal metabolic rate can be captured with clothing and especially caps, like a thin fabric cap and then a wool beanie/cap over that. Plus ~200ish watts of heat where you need it, head and hands.

I do have to use more heating if the temperature stays below 4C or so for more than 24 hours. That is, my indoor ambient temp was 11-12C on the night it was -15C outside - had it remained that cold for longer than a night i would have had to raise the indoor temp with electric heat, as mentioned, the split-air was woefully inadequate. I was just trying to avoid the central electric heat since it smells bad the first few times you use it in a season and it always wakes everyone up.

all this being said, people are different and my wife and son would have been miserable in the exact same situation. I was speaking directly to "fingers get too cold to type" with the laptop thing.

Lol, we use 3W LEDs for lighting... And not gonna change that with the electricity prices of today. And my M1 never gets hot and has no fans...

That's fine, however, if you're using heat at all in your home, having a "mining laptop" and a few incandescent lights around to take the chill off is not going to increase your electricity bill, unless you're using gas for heat. I forget the ranking of efficiency, heat pumps are more efficient than resistive heating (to a point well below -15 for more expensive units); however i forget where gas fits in that spectrum.

having a couple hundred watts of heat per person will lower your overall heating bill, all else being equal.

Of course I use gas for heat, most people do here. Electricity is way too expensive to heat with it, even for a programmer.

Thanks for the tips, but not very applicable in my situation. I never use the laptop keyboard, but rather an external ergonomic keyboard.

Building is from 1910s with central heating that I can control for my apartment, so doesn't affect my electric bill directly. Any form of electric heating would likely be more expensive.

Finally, I start wearing shorts and t-shirts at around 25°C, and my favourite indoor temp in summer is 27°C so I guess you're just better adapted for cooler weather.

I had never heard of the term wrist warmer! Just image-searched it, that looks great. I've tried fingerless gloves before (some family members have those for sailing) but those make it hard to type and I dropped that attempt. Will be seeing if I can buy some of those, or maybe repurpose some old gloves. Thanks for that :)

> I start the workday at 17°C in winter months. I live in an old building with poor-ish window insulation

That might also be your problem rather than the temperature. If there is any amount of air movement, like even just air being refreshed so to say, that takes away any lingering heat and replaces it with new, cold air. Of course, everyone's internal thermostat also works differently so I'm not saying this must be it but... something to consider.

> That might also be your problem rather than the temperature.

Yes, very possible. The windows have basic insulation but there is a small draft for sure. I'm renting so I'm not going to do any window renovations though.

Healthy young person here: joints are not a problem at 17°C, though I do pack myself in comfortably thick and warm clothing so a lot of that will make it into my (uncovered) hands. For me 17 is the limit, but definitely not yet problematic.

I do notice in the morning if I forget to turn on the heater (we're on the ground floor but sandwiched between neighbors who seem to keep it toastier) and the room is ~15°C. It takes an hour before I get cold after coming out of bed, but then, yup, typing is one of the things I notice after that time.

My living room is 18C when I wake up and I still have to tell my kids to get dressed and not veer around in boxer shorts before I start the heating.

The bedrooms are colder BTW.

> I think when you're calling bullshit, in order for it not to become a he-said, she-said situation, you should provide any sort of source.

You have it backwards. I'm saying there's no difference. The person making the claim there is a difference is the one who needs evidence.

I get a runny nose if I get cold. Same for my children. From an energy perspective, this make sense. If the body is expending more energy trying to get warm or not get cold, it may not have the necessary energy to fight off germs.

Also, the immune system works better hot, aka fever. Cooling the body can be expected to suppress the immune system.

Before you dismiss proverbs (old wives’ tales), consider that they could persist because they’re true.

> I get a runny nose if I get cold.

I was curious, so I looked it up, and according to [1] and [2], that's a natural reaction to help the nose turn cold, dry air into warm, moist air.

"When cold air enters the nose, it stimulates the sensory nerves within the nasal cavity to activate a process via a cholinergic reflex or pathway. It causes the vessels in the nasal cavity to expand and become engorged, leading to congestion and mucus secretion which produces a runny nose. It’s a compensatory mechanism that’s trying to maintain ideal conditions inside the nose by adding humidity and warmth while filtering the air."

1: https://medicine.uq.edu.au/article/2017/10/why-does-your-nos...

2: https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/blog/is-the-cold-weather-causi...

I would like to see a source on that, but the human body is orders of magnitude more complex than to reason about things like “it has to expend more energy” and “fever is good”. You could pretty much derive every effect from every input with these low level “conclusions”.

We have evidence-based medicine exactly because even when it would seem logical, biology puts a curve on that and the opposite of the intended effect happens.

Dress up.

Good study of excess winter deaths in Europe:

https://jech.bmj.com/content/57/10/784

>most countries suffer from 5% to 30% excess winter mortality

>The strong, positive relation with environmental temperature and strong negative relation with thermal efficiency indicate that housing standards in southern and western Europe play strong parts in such seasonality

This isn't supporting evidence. It says nothing about the impact of lower temperatures on your immune system. It's a correlation with total mortality which could be caused by many other unrelated things.

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