Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011)
lowtechmagazine.com
lowtechmagazine.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotatsu?wprov=sfla1
We use it in place of a coffee table and also use it as a dining table. My wife has trouble keeping warm, and she adores this table!
Only downside is that most kotatsu futon are designed for the traditional low table, so finding new covers/blankets is going to be difficult.
But I'm completely sold on the kotatsu concept. Highly recommended for toasty spouses!
Oh, and another cold spouse tip: Bedjet. It's like having your bed sheet made like a hot air balloon! A heater and fan pushes warm (or cold) air into the bag-like sheet. It works much, much faster than a heated blanket and doesn't have wires throughout the sheet that break. Again wins the cold spouse seal of approval.
I want to get some sort of reflective or insulating rug to alleviate some of the effects of the cold concrete floor. But until then, slippers do just fine!
Warm all day.
Most old homes in SF originally had (or at least were modified 100+ years ago to have) gravity fed heaters--no forced air, and no return registers in each room; just a single giant return register at a low point on a bottom floor. I've spoken with A/C contractors who say that there shouldn't be any serious problems rigging up a forced air system to the output registers, even without proper return registers. And plenty of homes do this. But I guess maybe the real problems come if you then being insulating the home--can the forced-air heating system circulate air quick enough without return registers to compensate for the fact the building no longer naturally ventilates? I imagine in most cases it works well enough, but you're still moderately more likely to see mold problems.
[1] To varying extents. My house was built in 1926, and it seems they used a relatively thin tar paper to wrap the house, or at least part of the house. (Unless that was somehow added much later, but I doubt it as the wall facing an adjacent house a few inches away is papered, and the siding is original on that wall.)
Typically only around 90% of the energy is recovered, even in ideal conditions.
That sounds good, but considering that for 'good air', you really want to be replacing the air fully every 10 minutes. That means after ~1.5 hours, you've lost nearly all the heat in your home.
Combine that with the fact the 90% is an ideal figure - in more typical installations it might be more like 50% because the incoming and outgoing airflows are not balanced, the heat exchanger is full of fluff and dust, and the humidity of the air is such that lots of energy is lost to the latent heat of vaporization.
Is it worth having one if you want a well ventilated house? Yes. Will it be worth replacing it in 5-10 years when more efficient models get designed...? Probably also yes.
As opposed to the 0% of energy recovered when a house "breathes" (i.e., leaks like a sieve) and lets out all the conditioned air?
> That sounds good, but considering that for 'good air', you really want to be replacing the air fully every 10 minutes.
[citation needed]
ASHRAE 62.2 does not mandate nearly that much air exchange. A 2,000 sq. ft. (200 sq. m) home is about 20,000 cu. ft. of volume, and needs about 100 cfm of ventilation. And some folks (e.g., Lstiburek) think ASHRAE (at least the newer revisions) is too high:
* https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/lstiburek-has-new-ventil...
* https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/how-much-fresh-...
It should be tied to the ACH value of the construction, as well as tied to occupancy sensors in each room.
What country are you in that has such standards? In Sweden the official recommendation in the building standards is once every other hour.
That obviously does not make any sense. You at least want to know the volume of the room/house before giving any number...
What "Replacing the air fully" equates to in terms of volume is already a factor of the size of the room/house.
You might want to know what volume of air that actually was to understand energy usage, but gp was talking about air quality, not energy efficiency.
Exactly. If one person lives in a castle, do we need to replace all the air every hour? Certainly not. If we are talking about a person in a 5sqm room (for sleeping) then replacing all air every hour won't be sufficient.
There are more factors besides the number of people and the air volume, but I really didn't want to go into so much detail.
As far as I know most of the heat in my home is stored in solid objects like the walls and not the air. Replace all the air and you still have the heat
Was it purposefully desgined to do this, or did it just happen because of construction methods of the time?
Also they built homes much smaller (the average home was less than 1000 sq feet 100 years ago, today it's 2400) and they tended to have smaller, compartmentalized rooms. This allowed for the inefficient home to use less energy anyways.
Where I live there are quite a few ~120 year old homes that are about 2400 sq feet. These would have been built by fairly wealthy people of that time as evidenced by old directories which indicate a live-in servant at most addresses, rift sawn moldings and floors, and stained glass windows on landings/in dining rooms. And although inefficient, they are smaller so they use similar amounts of energy to much larger modern homes.
Modern designs use direct vent systems, where instead of using inside air for combustion, they bring in outside air (and then exhaust externally as usual):
* https://www.efireplacestore.com/five-things-about-direct-ven...
The warming of the house occurs via radiant heat and through any conduction of heat via the actual material of fireplace or stove.
(And so while the house is sealed, the fire is not burning with the sealed boundary of the house.)
You could take an old house and bring it up to a modern standard but you would never recoup those energy savings both in terms of the cost to upgrade and the energy used to create and transport those materials.
Even just replacing the single glazed, wood windows that have an uninsulated weight box with modern windows is probably not worth it if the existing windows are weatherstripped (the most important thing) and have storm windows.
https://buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-001-the-p...
It's possible to mess up a very good old house made up of breathing materials with adding some plastic for example.
It's short sighted imho. The extractor is precisely the right place to just move air out for all kinds of health reasons, maybe someone should work on one that recaptures some of the heat (that would also make sense!); I have not yet seen one.
It's possible to install dampers that are normally closed for airtightness, but open when the kitchen vent is activated (both on the exhaust, and makeup air, side of things):
* https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/makeup-air-for-...
Even the Passive House folks are fine with this arrangement (§3.4):
> When the exhaust air system is not operating the exhaust air and intake air vents should close airtight and should not cause any leakage volume flow. Furthermore, additional insulation will be advantageous at these locations.
* https://passiv.de/downloads/05_extractor_hoods_guideline.pdf
So I'm not sure why your building codes mandate recirculation, since I'm guessing even they wouldn't be as "strict" as the PH folks.
EDIT: it looks like the terms are 'Prescriptive' and 'Performance'. e.g. https://www.energycodes.gov/sites/default/files/2019-09/Ener...
[1]: https://www.berbel.de/dunstabzuege/zubehoer/abluft-zubehoer/...
[1] https://www.ventilatieshop.com/terugslagklep-in-ventilatieka...
Opening and closing, means you get the best of both worlds.
i think the modern cooking extractors are all built into the countertops and just filter the air. at least thats the trend in germany
Heat recovery from an extractor (eg remove heat from air before expelling) would achieve the goal the rating is aimed at, without compromising indoor air quality by not having a way to remove humidity. Or maybe another kind of integrated dehumidifier that discharges in your sink/plumbing maybe.
Those filter-only extractors won't do for anyone serious about indoor air quality.
The choice is to either rebalance/demote everyone who built a top rated property 25 years ago, or add more tiers. Political will means we do the latter.
It's also more directly meaningful to customers. An A+++++ mansion is going to use more energy to heat than a modest A+++ house.
Because numbers require everyone who is involved in comparing options (i.e. consudmers) to have intimate knowledge of what those numbers mean. Is X kwh actually good? How does it compare to other houses in the area? What number do you use - the amount of energy it will take to heat the house, or the amount of energy of a specific type you will use. How do you compare those (a house with Natural Gas as a heat source will require significantly less electricity to heat than a house with electric radiators, but will likely _cost_ more).
Using ratings gives a standardised way to compare them. If you compare two houses, one has an A rating and one has a B rating, the B one is strictly worse, by an amount that someone who knows something about this has deemed significant.
> That's what appliances do
Appliances are graded on a similar score here. Every appliance you buy in the EU has one of these [0] labels (which has the same problem).
> An A+++++ mansion is going to use more energy to heat than a modest A+++ house.
You're comparing two different things here, and forgetting a very important point - someone who is going to buy a "mansion" is not going to buy a modest house, so it doesn't matter what the rating of the house is in comparison. What matters is the rating of the mansion next door.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_energy_label
It even shows the average cost of other similar products. So you can see both the absolute numbers and a visual representation of how efficient something is in relative terms without having to squint and count '+' marks.
I don't see why we couldn't do that for houses. Maybe use a unit like BTU instead of kwh to account for different heating sources. And include a comparison to the average range for houses in the area.
This would be a lot more concrete and avoid arbitrary ratings. If the ratings are based on bureaucratic rules (i.e. can't have stovetop vents) instead of actual measurements, then it feels a lot less meaningful. "This house will cost about $X to heat each year" is a much more useful piece of information for someone house shopping.
[1] https://www.sce.com/residential/home-energy-guide/energy-sta...
https://www.cse.org.uk/advice/advice-and-support/mechanical-...
They are certainly common, but I think far from standard.
I am surprised at the idea that MVHRs have been required anywhere for as much as 20 years.
We've settled on always leaving one window slightly open if it is windy outside, or 2-3 on still days.
Also, don't forget to take a cup of warm tea now and then. Or do some pushups, jumping jacks and squats when feeling cold at home.
I expected that to be the cause, but me eating cold yoghurt to replenish my energy or me eating a hot sandwich makes a big difference, I now notice.
I don't need anything fancy but the higher range stuff (Helly Hansen, Arcteryx, Patagonia, etc.) is easily triple that.
Overall I'm really happy with all the clothes I got from Uniqlo.
>one "clo" equals the thermal insulation required to keep a resting person (for instance, a couch potato) indefinitely comfortable at a temperature of 21° Celsius (70° Fahrenheit)
This assumes we all produce the same output heat. We do not. Even at rest people output different amounts of heat. Normal skin temps range by almost 8 degrees Fahrenheit.
Edit:
Forgot to add "comfortable" is in the definition and comfort is always a subjective. I might be comfortable in my underwear at 70 degrees. And someone else (apparently) is comfortable in a three piece suit at 70.
4.5C for those wondering.
Cold climates: same idea with an integrated block heater. Now we can sit in your basements in our t shirts and boxers.
Later, our glucose vitamin pumps keep our blood sugar at ideal levels as our digestive tracts atrophy and eventually becomes vestiges.
With relief, we can literally feel the heat and sugar spreading from our centers out towards our extremities as we drop in and power on our headsets...
Much later, we introduce blood oxygenator units to get rid of those troublesome respiratory issues.
Now and in the future, science fiction, pitch deck, and existing tech become blurred together.
If the insulation cuts heating cost in half, that's a 1250$ savings per year, meaning a 48 year break even time assuming zero discount rate. It absolutely doesn't make sense to do the work unless there's a massive tax subsidy or contractor costs come down (which is bad for the environment)
Years ago, i researched insulating my home...an old home that was split into 2 living portions...and whose front half/portion was built in late 1800s, and back portion of home was built around late 1910s. So, you can imagine it was pretty much a sieve, just burning our money. So, i did get a few costly quotes...but the cheap husband in me wondered if i can do things piecemeal....and i assure you that its possible. There are lots of factors to consider....but you can research and determine for yourself.
Here is my suggestion:
1. Contact your electric company/provider...and ask them if they offer a free energy assessment. Ours did, and it helped us determine the exact zones/sections of our home where we had the worse heat loss. This assessment was so valuable, i wold have paid to have this done!
2. Research where you/your family spend the most time in the home. My opinion is that the bedrooms should be the last places to insulate, since blankets (and bodies) help keep things warm in this type of room.
3. Consider which areas of the home can be insulated via easier methods - like spray foamy stuff - which may only need little holes and not necessary to tear down full walls, etc. Some of these foams are not as insulating as traditional options, but the ease and cost is more than enough to justify things.
4. Ideally start on the outside walls of the home, and of the specific rooms/area where you will focus your first work.
There is so much more on thios topic...but keeping the work low in scope, and iterative really can help...its all about being clever here. Good luck!!
That is what I did, insulating the attic but not getting around to the walls and basement.
I'd bet insulating your home (at construction time) for the same effect is also cheaper over a lifetime of a house than warm clothes for all the inhabitants.
Lastly, the pleasure of going near naked at home is worth every penny.
Depending on the assumptions: the cost of heating has amounted to several-to-many salaries for some - even for white collars of industrialized countries in recent times.
EDIT: I have no mold, but I live in a very dry environment — high altitude, mountainous. Lots of snow but very dry air. Today it was 10 F (-12 C), but that is not typical. We are in a cold spell. I am nowhere near the sea, like Denmark, as mentioned in other comments.
Try this. You can do it. As another commenter wrote, get gloves with the fingertips cut out.
I can see 13 degrees not doing much harm in places arctic perhaps, but it is something to be aware of.
Can you provide a source ? This would mean that all unoccupied houses would be damaged, since they are just heated to avoid freezing (10 ?).
Warm air can hold more moisture than cold air. Humans and their activities give off moisture. In winter humans maintain warmer than ambient temperatures. Therefore at some point the warm wet air is going to cool and reach its dew point.
Ideally you don't want this happening in the house, whether it does depends on the inside temp and the outside temp and humidity inside and out.
So there's a few knobs you can twiddle, temp being one.
They say 18 degrees, to avoid issue with moisture. It very much depends on how the home is built I'd assume, because holiday homes are normally kept colder, down to 5 degrees, during the winter.
The thermostat is now back up to 19.5°C.
But drywall (and other porous surfaces) are supposed to help regulate moisture, so if they never get an opportunity to dry because it's permanently cold and humid, yeah, that'll be a problem. Cracking a window at least 30 minutes per day (ideally on dry days) does wonders, though it won't help temperatures in winter.
In practice... say, there is a dog that likes to gnaw on corners and thus punctures the vapor barrier. Happened to my own house's outside insulation. That's just one of many "unforeseen" ways how these foils and barriers stop working. I fully expect the polystyrene there to get moldy in 20 years or even less.
Presumably your fridge and freezer is breaking that rule.
Edit: it's a genuine question. Is that the minimum temp anywhere in the house or the average? What about an attached garage?
The insurance company does not want stupid actions by the owner causing property losses. If you have utilities shut off to the property for a month in freezing winter weather and all of the pipes freeze, they’ll be able to determine that you did not maintain 16 degrees.
Which suggests this is more about mold etc. If they don't want to cover frozen pipes then fair enough, they should really state that because then it becomes unclear what the situation is in the case of a garage or if you have a pipe in the attic or cellar.
Now this also doesn't mean that frozen pipes aren't covered. It is possible to have pipes freeze while keeping normal indoor air temps. Not all pipes are in conditioned space.
No of course they won't. That would be giving up good money. Instead when you make a claim they'll reject it on some basis around the property not being kept at 16c.
You must be fun at parties.
touche
I might be in for a surprise, but I don't think there has been a year where the temperature has been above 19 degrees for six months of the year. I'm curious if you have a source on that?
That doesn't seem strange to me. At even lower temperatures, water pipes will burst, so you have to heat it at least a little in winter. Waste heat from humans might be enough to avoid freezing temperatures, but then humans also produce a lot of humidity, causing mold.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Mens-Fingerless-Ragg-Wool-Gloves-...
So we're all going to become Fremen, wearing stillsuits?
Like Adam Savage’s cooling suit: https://youtu.be/z_Ti4GP0ntE
These body suits do exactly what's being described in these comments. Wearable packs which regulate humidity, temperature etc.
Much easier is to have plumbing in suit, and just plugin to heat exchanger pump on every location.
I want to walk around in boxers and a T-shirt when at home.
But it is selfish to have what I want and not care about the future of our planet, so I make some compromises.
Pay more for more heat or pay for fancy thermal underwear. Choose what selfishly makes you happier.
FWIW, I don't wear fancy thermal underwear. I do accept that wearing a warm jumper during the winter (while heating my house to 19 or 20 degC) is a perfectly reasonable compromise.
>May as well heat them all as the cost difference is minimal
If you sit down and reason out the math, you find that this isn't actually true.
The total heat loss is proportional to the temperature difference integrated over the total area of the building envelope (weighted by U-value). The integrated heat flux through this surface must equal the heat supplied within the interior, primarily by the heating system.
If rooms with exterior walls are colder (when in the equilibrium maintained by the heating system), then by definition you're losing less energy through that surface, so therefore less energy must be added.
--
The advice also wildly disagreed with my own experience, which is that shutting off unused rooms (especially rooms that are naturally colder anyway) has resulted in large energy savings.
I do make sure to regularly monitor such rooms for any sign of moisture or mold, but blocking off the vent/under-door airflow (and keeping a particularly chilly guest room closet ajar) seems to suffice.
What I meant was wearing a t-shirt and shorts in a room at 19c and feeling awesome versus being all dressed up in a merino tight fitting sweater and tight fitting leggings in a cooler room. I see no health benefits there, really, no matter how breathable and natural merino is.
And you would need to wash that wool daily (or rather often) if you were wearing it daily. And by now you probably know that merino is a sensitive fabric, and the more you wash it — the faster it degrades (compared to cotton).
That all adds up. And I don't see it as being practical and making too much sense, that's it.
And I'd expect any fabric to wear out when you wear it (there's probably a good pun to make here).
Secondly I have experimented quite a lot this winter with clothing to reduce home heating requirements. I used to keep my home at 24C(74F) and wear short pants and short sleeves made of cotton. Now I keep the home at 20C(68F) during the day and 18C(64F) during the night. My heating bill is now half and I did notice I sleep a lot better at 18C then I used to at 24C.
I wear synthetic form fitting long pants and sleeves thermal base layer and a loose synthetic robe on top of those. The base layer keeps more heat but more importantly evacuates sweat a lot better than cotton. The robe is what keeps most of the heat trapping air inside being thick but also air between it and the base layer. You can find a lot of material on the internet about layering clothes and what each layer should do. One mistake I used to make and the article seems to think so as well is that the base layer's role is to keep heat.
I chose synthetic over wool for home because of the huge price difference and also the wear resistance. It's 10 euros vs 200 euros, I can wash it without care, I won't cry if they get stained with coffee, etc. I use merino wool when going out.
After these experiments I plan to get rid of most of my cotton clothes and replace them with synthetic and merino wool, even for the summer. I can't believe how I put up with the humidity trapping cotton for so long.
I am also interested to hear what other people experimented in this regard and their results.
Airtight, properly insulated and ventilated structures are a way to reduce energy consumption. They are also very comfortable and healthy IAQ-wise.
A 5,000 sq. ft. (500 sq. m) structure can use as little as 2000W (2 kW, i.e. a hair dryer) to keep the inside properly conditioned:
A modern building with modern and super expensive insulation use less heating power. Ironically the second comment of your video says "Actually the major key to success is an unlimited budget."
What a discovery. That's not the case of 99,99% of buildings on this planet though.
However, the article you are commenting just says that before buying tens of thousands dollars of insulating material that you'll have to install somehow, the first thing you can do is wearing a pull over and a pair of socks.
Nobody says that you have to choose between insulating your home or your body. Just do both if you can.
Which is already being addressed:
> Key to the PGH approach is balancing expenditures and gains. Where other programs use specific energy-use targets or other criteria, and the building code establishes a baseline (“the worst house you can legally build”), a PGH goes above code until it stops making financial sense. On some new homes, that may be not far above code, and on other projects performance may rival that of a Passive House, but in most cases it will be somewhere in between those two standards.
* https://www.prettygoodhouse.org/economics
Being able to live at 22C, 40-60% RH, and filtered air exchange via ERV, isn't as difficult as going to the moon. An increase of 5-10% in building cost for better air sealing, a little more insulation (and reducing thermal bridging), and some mechanicals isn't crazy.
Yes but you forgot the part where the vast majority of the world population don't live in a brand new building.
Insulating my not so old house (1998) to be up to the modern norms would cost me something like 50/60k€.
However most people in the world already live in an existing building. Insulating an existing building is not what I would call cheap, especially if you are still paying a mortgage.
Most existing houses get a significant remodel once in a while as well. If you are doing that you should bring the changed areas to better code. Much siding only lasts for 25 years, so just put insulation under it while doing the regular replacement can make a big difference as well for not much more since you have to pay for a lot of labor.
Heated buildings are a pretty awesome way to adapt to cold natural conditions.
Maybe their house is powered by carbon neutral power generation, too. It's not always zero sum.
If I had gas heating or fossil electricity I would probably have a different view of it. I mean right now it's mostly just economics: either I spend on insulation, or renewable energy, or I don't spend and lower the thermostat.
Funny, I find it weird to dress (so) differently indoors to out in winter. Why should it take more preparation to leave my house in winter than in summer? That seems like a defect.
I am actively working on plans for a new home construction that will meet PassivHaus standards and use FAR FAR FAR less energy than the place I currently live, and be able to use primarily locally sourced renewable (rooftop solar) for the majority of its energy requirements. This is both much better for the environment, and much better for my quality of life, and doesn't require me to wear thermals and pajamas with fur slippers to bed under two duvets in order to not freeze to death while I'm sleeping. I don't understand the mindset of someone who would bust their ass working in order to live like a pauper pre-industrial revolution. I work so I can afford to have luxuries like indoor plumbing, effective heating and cooling, and comfort-based climate controls.
The environment is a major concern for me, and I applaud folks for thinking of ways for humanity to use less energy, but going without what I consider to be basic modern amenities is not the way. We can use modern technology to drastically (like several orders of magnitude) reduce our energy usage without resorting to a drop in quality of life.
And I remember the time when we had poor insulation, mostly in windows - it was misery to stay indoors in a sweater, still feeling a bit cold, but in warm sneakers, and feet sweating. Triple-glass packet windows were a blessing!
Have you considered that maybe your sweater could be comfortable?
When you go outside, you're going to want a sweater on anyway. Why is it better to have to change your clothes when you go inside and outside?
I'm sure people here are having so much disagreement because they live in very different climates.
I stayed some days in Italy in winter, and their indoor heating was just minimal, it was like +17 C (62 F). I did find it miserable. You can't take a shower quietly, because it's cold in the bathroom too, and you must dress up very very quickly. How do people in such places go to the toilet when they wake up at night? Do they sleep dressed? Or dress up, or just endure the cold for couple of minutes?
I'll find it ok to put on a sweater for the most cold week or two in a year, but not for months.
Not necessarily. Underwear I'll grant, it'd be uncomfortable not to, but otherwise I don't see why one has to wear clothes.
Also, do blankets count as clothes? You (or I, at least :-)) can easily be comfortable "wearing" just a blanket and underwear at a temp of around 10 °C.
Similarly, a cold climate is where it gets hot inside in the summer. And then there is coastal California, which has elements of both.
This is an important distinction to make. By omitting it your original comment seems to be purposely touting a lack of concern for personal emissions reduction.
really make me question the basic intelligence of the author.
Nonetheless, there is some odd distortion there, with short circuits: the author relates «hair (or feathers)» to «heat transfer», but some argue that hair - that humans did in fact keep - is a protection against insects (to feel them as they "land"), before heat conservation; and on the same line the reason to leave the eastern African peri-rift was to escape insects (and other pests), which resist less in colder climates. The topmost human killers include, after mosquitoes, bugs and flies. Hair is not a protection from canids, but they remain near the top of human killers and cold climates reduce the threat coming from strays, and some types of clothing can offer some protection.
Clothing is not just a matter of heat conservation.
Insult my basic intelligence as well, but I personally think the fact that we are the only non-tropical ape is interesting and relevant. Even amongst primates in general there are very few that have ever made it in temperate areas and they never got as far as us. All this despite us not having fur
> Long underwear has more advantages over other clothing options. It does not hide your body shape and can maintain sex-appeal, a common concern for both men and women
If this is not your concern, consider that there is no problem with putting on loose clothes. It will work fine because the trapped air itself acts as an insulator. The pumping coefficient only materially significant for things like dresses.
https://www.smartwool.com/what-matters.html#/smartwool/zqrx-...
I just noticed them today. Don't really know much about them.
> Merino wool is renewable. It’s made up of proteins and amino acids. It naturally breaks down in water and soil.
So what happens when I was the cloth or sweat?
How long is the expected lifetime of the product if water speeds up degradation?
Wooly jumpers, especially when made of fragile merino wool, remain usable for much longer when they are made of a mix that includes plastic fibers (maybe 75% merino, 25% polyester).
I do think it needs more care than fabrics like cotton or polyester. I wash wool separately on delicate and air dry. The centrifugal drying by the washing machine gets rid of nearly all the water, leaving them moist rather than damp.
The problem with animals like sheep is that they take up a huge amount of land, both directly grazing and for any additional feed that they require. The more intensively you farm them, the more ecosystem damage they do, but of course less intensive grazing either requires more land or reduces production and increases prices.
I couldn't quickly find any numbers to compare to other materials like cotton, but at least for food production, grazing animals are an order of magnitude worse on this metric than any plant-based crops (e.g. [1]).
The reason that land usage is bad is because it's zero sum: land that's being used for farming is likely to be less good at trapping carbon than other possible uses of the same land (e.g. reforestation), and is typically not very good habitat for wildlife (sheep in particular selectively graze on the tastiest plants and so tend to leave behind a monoculture of rough grasses which are their least favourite food).
If you have to buy new clothes today, I don't really know what the best option is. Plastic-based fibres obviously require oil (although many are based on recycled plastics) and end up creating microplastic pollution and waste products that won't biodegrade. Cotton is very land intensive to produce, but I suspect wool is even worse. Maybe destroying land in the tropics is worse for biodiversity than grazing sheep in temperate regions (similar to palm oil being land efficient, but damaging to rainforests in particular)? In any case I don't know of a simple way to weigh these tradeoffs.
The only thing that seems unambiguously like a win is buying fewer clothes and making them last longer.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/land-use-per-kg-poore
But yes I agree that our worst enemy is fashion and the trend towards replacing perfectly working things with newer ones just for the sake of it.
To use that to one's advantage:
A little colder environment (e.g 18C/64F) than your comfort zone (e.g. 22C/72F) at normal humidity reminds you taking little breaks and be active during the day, it doesn't take much ("active recovery": 40-70% of your heart max; depending on your fitness status) and it goes a long way.
If you include the cognitive benefits/enhancement you get from deliberate short breaks instead of grinding hours away sitting in front of a screen, I struggle to really see a need to hack our biological design for a little colder environment. (sitting in a loose T and shorts outfit through trial and error I found out that I begin to feel noticeable uncomfortable at about 14-16C depending on my activity level throughout the day; I set my thermostat usually 1-2 degree above that (16C-18C) in accordance to the indoor humidity levels.)
Our bodies are extremely efficient [0] at regulating body temperature if one is cognizant of the instruction manual inherited through our evolution history.
Incorporating some High-Intensity/Resistance training gives an additional metabolic boost/afterburn which - no surprise here - synergistically couples itself with low-intensity/active recovery mode.
A bonus would be to expose yourself deliberately to extreme cold for a very short period of time (working your way slowly up). I personally don't go for numbers here but rather for the regular experience of real cold hitting your body and shifting some powerful gears (similar to an appreciation of "hunger" after a fast).
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_adipose_tissue#Functio...
... which are endocrine disruptors turn produce microplastics. memo: plastics are bad.
I've checked the big brands but merino is a lot more expensive than synthetic stuff.
Ultimately your existence is going to create externalities. Unless you're proposing to commit Hari Kiri what ever option you choose will create externalities. So at some point you're going to have to accept that you are leaving a mark on the world.
I personally believe a few grams of microplastics is acceptable in view of the tonnes of co2 not emitted.
In my last year of study I was writing up my honours project and I had to stop to wipe the condensation off of my monitor. Mind you, it was about 2am.
Not to mention I need heat to keep my plumbing from freezing.
As long as they had proper insulation from construction or a retrofit they're great. The one i grew up (built by Construction Troops in a hurry) had terrible insulation, with newspapers used to fill gaps between the windows and the walls during construction, but after the (government-sponsored) renewal of the exterior it's pretty damn good.
Wool is nice and merino wool is the best.
Some synthetic stuff might also work, but is not so nice on the skin and some fiber just acts like a plastic sheet, meaning trapping all moisture inside.
But to repeat, we climbers and winter campers use merino wool. It is a bit more expensive, but worth it.
A little bit of sweat is normal, the problem comes, when this sweat cannot vaporate, but remain trapped inside your clothes.
Maybe try merino wool.
Check transpiration friendly clothing (I am missing the terminology right now) - the underware (and apparel) that you would wear while doing intensive sport. There exists fabric that attempts retention of heat and avoidance of sweating (and its cooling effect).
(By the way: as I tried searching for better terms, three instances, I met the following results, one per instance: 'transgender clothing'; 'see-through clothing'; 'the sexualization of women in sports'. The search engines algorithms are getting some fixation?)
Moisture wicking clothing?
However, I want "cool people, not spaces" for summer, and it seems rather difficult to find such products - e.g. some kind of blanket and jacket with tubes, and some small compressor-based chiller (Peltier cells are solid-state, but the efficiency is terrible). Any suggestions?
Also insulating the body is great and all, but then all your surfaces are cold. Every time you open a door, your hand gets freezing. Your sofa is cold. Your chair is cold. Your floor is cold. It's just not a comfortable way to live. It's unpleasant.
Then, any bits of your flesh exposed to the cold air in your house also feel cold.
Not to mention how much more uncomfortable it is to have to layer up at home, rather than just being able to wear a set of pyjamas.
...The dreaded sociologistic '«we»' ("We have killed Julius Caesar!" No sorry, I was elsewhere).
The "heating power" of the human body is estimated by some computers (maybe 'crunchers', for reduced chance of misunderstanding?) to be around 100W, based on typically intaken calories.
(...We had checked.)
Solar version here: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/02/body-insulation-th...
For example eating less is also associated with poverty. But people in more economically developed countries eat a massive excess of food causing epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Just because eating less is associated with poverty doesn't change the fact that eating less would hugely benefit the health of most people in wealthier countries.
Sometimes affluence results in excesses with significant negative consequences. And our excessive diets and energy consumption both have significant negative consequences.
If you come from a place where isolation and HVAC/heating are not common then you're going to wear thicker clothes at home because there is no other way
Sure, you might have a bathroom heater or something but that's pretty much it
So, yeah. Wear that sweatshirt at home because that's extra comfy
Debating the environmental aspects of whether to wear a jumper may be 'privileged' country talk.
Debating whether to wear a jumper has been long discussed in times and countries poorer than our own. You see energy costs, money generally, and the thing that the less privileged tend to have less of is money, so they have to decide more carefully where to spend it.
I don't know why you made this an issue, should we just put on heaters out of respect for the plebs? Self flagellation? What's your solution to this wokian conundrum?
Insulation: First the body, then the home (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25418676 - Dec 2020 (305 comments)
The fan definitely helps, but when it's over 100 degrees outside every day for weeks you gotta crank up the AC or it's rough
Pigovian taxes are the correct solution here, rather than moralizing over preferences.