Maintenance of old crumbling European castles in inconvenient locations are also often famously bad deals for the owner.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/no-way-back-1-15m-120000548....
I guess nowadays one would not need to employ as large a retinue… but you don’t get to tax the local villages anymore. Seems like a wash.
Very much light entertainment, but it's eye opening how significant of a restoration and maintenance burden it is.
Now, Italy is a bit warmer than the UK, and most castles a bit smaller, but castles in Italy can be on colder mountaintops.
2. Use heatpumps, wood furnaces, accumulator tanks
3. Only heat the rooms you use when you use them.
It's very doable, especially in Italy.
It will cost you a lot anyway, can't escape entropy.
Makes the 2.4 GHz spectrum pretty unusable, though.
They quickly found out it doesn't work well. Microwaves heats up liquid water so the people got nice and warm, but not any of the furniture and such.
So the floor would be cold to walk on, the sofa would be cold to sit down in and so on.
It was a similar experience where initially it seemed great in the winter how quickly a room felt “warm”. But quickly you notice the air itself isn’t as warm which isn’t very pleasant and wait, I’m not feeling “warm” anymore I’m feeling “very hot”.
I basically gave up using them after the first winter except turned up sub-perceptually at like 25% just to add a bit of heat input to reduce the days where I need a space heater.
The real problems are that stone is a terrible insulator, that single-pane windows are even worse, and that air leakage in old structures is incredibly wasteful.