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Comment by hahamrfunnyguy | Hacker News Reader

This article goes on at length about how bad a cold home is, but never even defines what "cold" is. Japanese homes are kept very cool in the winter, by western standards. I once went to visit a friend during the winter whose wife was Japanese. Their house was like 50 degrees and they were sitting around in jackets. Not knowing about that point of Japanese culture at the time, I thought it was pretty unusual.

It seems plausible that there are health related issues from being cold, but I am skeptical that a cooler interior temperature is really the problem. To use another example from Japan, they have heated table blankets so that you're nice and toasty sitting around the table. For more examples, you can look to nomadic people that live in temporary/portable dwellings that are often unheated.

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South of France here (5°C - 35°C outside, 15°C - 30°C inside my flat), I don't use any heating nor hot water, nor air conditioning all year long, very few devices and really low electricity bill (10€/mo)

> (10€/mo)

I have to pay about double that per month (in £) for electricity, even if I don't use any electricity at all! And the electricity I do use costs nearly that much per day, and that's without having to use any of it for heating or hot water, which is all on gas and costs about as much again.

https://imgur.com/fftDs3q

I don't have heating nor hot water as said, it's basically light, laptop, rice cooker, fan in summer sometimes (hence +1€ there)

You probably have leaks or plugged devices

Note: while this is indeed the Japanese standard, it’s not universal: houses of Honshu (the main island) tend to be badly insulated, drafty, and spot-heated. Houses of Hokkaido (and possibly northern Honshu) are much closer to western standards, with insulation and central heating.

The cold is not an issue in and of itself, but it can be a problem depending on other ailments, as well as habits and habituation.

Winter temperatures in the UK have reached 10 degrees Fahrenheit or lower in recent years, and British people aren't usually adapted to living in yurts.

Presumably their ancestors who've lived there since before modern HVAC survived and perhaps even thrived somehow. That may be snarky, but I honestly don't know how people really lived back then; I just know the UK has been inhabited since pre-history.

They burned wood and built their homes accordingly. Also, extended families all lived together and slept together so the combined body heat, along with the fire, and lots and lots of blankets, kept everybody warm. That's fine and all but we haven't been building houses that way for over 200 years and the people then deforested large swaths of Europe by burning so much wood, there simply isn't enough trees to burn to warm today's population.

I suppose better said would be that as a person who was born in the post-industrial era and lived my entire life in the sub-tropics of South Texas, I don't really have an idea of the lived experience of dwelling through a real winter in pre-modern times. (Though I did get a taste of it in February 2021).

Your homes in Texas are designed to rapidly dissipate heat, which is the exact opposite of what you want in a cold climate. That's another reason you folks got so cold. Also, there's basic strategies for dealing with power outages in subfreezing temperatures you guys didn't know about because you've never had to contend with that before. It was a perfect storm so-to-speak and sadly it cost some people their lives.

Up here in the North we get a taste of living through a real winter in pre-modern times by camping in unheated log cabins in the winter. Fire is essential and even so we benefit from "modern" wood burning stoves - "modern" meaning stoves that came about in the early 19th century. Believe it or not it's fun to do that for a few days in the Winter, but that's a far cry from living that way on a daily bases.

Also, you would be shocked to see how much wood you go through for heat!

I am guessing they burned a lot of wood. Which in a small space can heat things very nicely but has other negative effects.

Yeah, I will say that this isn't completely hypothetical to me. I've lived in Texas my entire life including through the winter blackout of February 2021. It was truly anomalous weather for us to be caught in single digit temperatures with no power to run any HVAC systems, and most homes don't have fireplaces. It was unpleasant, but in the end the cold wasn't particularly dangerous.

Since then, I've stored away a small indoor-safe propane heater with a few days of fuel supply and a 2KW generator.

Aside from the other replies it's probably worth noting that standards of health have improved in the last 100 years at least partly because of better insulation and heating; the problems mentioned in the article were problems then too.

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