An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm | Hacker News Reader

An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm

bbc.com

185 pointsviscousviolin180 comments

The castles and mansions were relatively modern. Most people didn't have "good" home design, they had older, practical architecture. Their homes had thin walls, were drafty, and had no chimneys; there was a hole in the roof where the smoke from your fire would go, so your attic was filled with smoke (where you'd smoke meats for winter).

You're better served by looking to 19th century lower and middle class architecture. Right before air conditioning, but with relatively modern designs using modern building materials and practices ("insulation" (horsehair and newspaper), fireplaces/stoves, corridors with doors to separate cold rooms from hot ones, windows designed to allow cross-breezes, covered porches to provide shade in summer, etc). Right before air conditioning came in, we had pretty much gotten to the peak of design that used natural forms of temperature regulation. Some designs even created mini greenhouses of glass, with half the wall mounted with earth, for thermal regulation as well as solar heating. The only better passive methods invented since then is geothermal.

The peak of winter heat management were the pechka, Russian rocket stoves built into literal tons of masonry, for the most thermal mass possible. You'd heat it up once with a small amount of wood and it warms the house the whole day. They were so big you could sleep on top of it.

The 19th century was basically the low point of Dutch civilization. People stayed warm because 10 people slept in one room.

It was so bad that even rich people had to admit that the country had become an embarrassment.

Ignoring the colonial era of course.

Modern insulation with hvac is better yet. You need hvac to bring air in as a modern house should be air tight. Not much heat or ac should be needed.

I’m inclined to agree, even in cold places. AC is remarkably efficient, especially when you reverse it (and get a heat pump).

…but when electricity dies down, you’re basically fucked.

My main source of heating is a gas boiler, but it requires two pumps to actually push the water around. If our power is out we have no heating.

> "insulation" (horsehair and newspaper)

It immediately brings to mind when we had insulation blown into our walls, and the guy doing the work showing us the shredded newspaper treated with borax, and explaining how the borax made it fire-resistant.

The masonry heater has a long history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonry_heater

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Baker

When we lost power for 10 days a few winters back we attempted to use the fire place for heat. It was a fail. Post and beam house (large wide open floor plan) with a large transfer from 1st to 2nd floor, and apprently my lack of skill for optimizing heat over beauty in the fireplace, left us without much of a thermal bump. To this day I swear we were pulling heat out of the chimney faster than we were heating the house; I cooled the house with fire.

That’s not uncommon, but having grown up in a house heated by wood fires I knew that when building our current house. The main fireplace is on a central wall and has enormous thermal mass. Beauty and utility can be combined.

My grandparents' house was this way - the chimney was in the center of the house (built sometime in the late 1800s and rebuilt in the 1950s).

The fireplace had a stone chimney - and the kitchen was built in an 'L' shape around the first floor of the fireplace. The (master) bedroom (an additional bedroom was built in the 1950s), the stone of the chimney was a good quarter of one of the walls.

I do, however, think that the rough hewn stone and mortar of the chimney with the insets around it had a certain rustic beauty... aside from the "that got warm" in the winter and could keep the kitchen, living room, and bedroom warm.

Yeah, if you actually want to heat the house with fire you’ll want an insert or a wood stove. Otherwise most fireplaces in most houses are decorative, and one pays for that decoration with heat loss.

And even those will require draft from outside the insert / stove, so either you build them with an inlet from outside, you pull cold air from badly sealed doors / windows, or the chimney draft will be insufficient.

They will require breathing but much less than an open fireplace and a lot more of the heat will be kept inside and not sent through the chimney. So overall they’re way on the positive side. If you can get a cold air inlet it’s better, but it’s far from necessary.

> insert / stove

As a kid I lived in homes with both - and a home with a barrel stove - and as an adult with a pellet stove and I don’t remember that being a problem. Net, it was fine?

By law new wood stoves in many places MUST have an outside air intake

Yeah fireplaces don’t make sense to me. Hot air rises and it sucks the existing heated air in the house which all flows out. The only way to heat the space is you need something with a lot of thermal mass that heats up in the process and then radiates heat. So a lot of bricks around the fire, some sort of baffle to enable the heat transfer and a system that sucks in air from the outside.

I like the idea of an outside vent, and unfortunately, I think an insert of some kind. I can't help but first think of the goofy look of a wood fired stove sitting half in and half out of the fireplace. Surrounded by a few tons of river rock. That said, after a couple days of a couple degrees, it's either that or the tent in the basement.

*outside intake. The vent would just be the chimney.

The problem with outside vents is sometimes smoke goes out them - air comes down the chimney.

What you imagine is called a rocket stove mass heater, and it has other names too. Works wonderfully well.

We saw stoves/fireplaces like this in a bunch of taverns in Slovenia. Huge hulking tiled cubes around the center of the building that just radiated a pleasant heat from every square inch of the surface. I imagine it was quite efficient, with just a very low fire burning to keep it in equilibrium.

If it was a rocket stove, it was a very small very hot fire. I've had a bit of a love affair with rocket stoves lately (even replaced my BBQ/grill with one).

It's challenging to design the exhaust so that the smoke goes away, but not too much heat.

To use it effectively you want one with water jacket and just use that hot water with your normal house heating system. You don't need much power to run circulation pump so UPS + some solar panels should be enough even in deep winter. There are also systems that get it out of the exhaust but that doesn't get you much heat storage, just instant heat and generally less efficient.

Old school version of that were masonry stoves that come with ton+ of mass for the bricks and smoke being routed all over (often including a place to sleep) to take as much heat as possible from it.

If I had money for that I'd put a big hot water tank for buffer, heat it normally with heat pump, and just had emergency water-sheathed fireplate, with big buffer you can just fire it up once and have tank slowly give the heat back to the building. Or fire it up at the coldest days to save some heat pump power in days where there is barely any solar.

This isn't a good idea because the water cools the fire too fast and you tend to get soot build up inside.

I know someone who gets through the winter off their fireplace. Really old timber house with riverrock chimney. Their fireplace looks nothing like what you think of a fire place looking. You can’t see the fire, there is like this big iron door in front of it. They go through a huge pile of wood every winter, along with a couple electric heaters for rooms or office.

I assume most decorative fireplaces on the other hand are not built to heat the house.

I grew up like this. We had special glass plates on the doors so you could see the fire (though this meant cleaning the glass every week).

There are a bunch of these on our island. The fireplaces are in the middle of the house, small doors, and once they get that brick warm the houses are 80 all winter long. They were built by Russian families in the 1940s, maybe a couple dozen homes on about 300 acres. The rest of the home's construction was typical; except for a few innovative walkways between main house and garage. I'm guessing it's what they knew from their homeland, even though temperatures here rarely drop below 20, and then, only for a short time.

That sounds really interesting. Which island is that?

There's a whole site dedicated to the (highly efficient) Russian/German stove: https://larsenfamily.com/russian_stove/nojava/index.html

It's pretty much 10 to 20% efficiency for an open chimney and 80% for a good wood stove so your result isn't surprising.

Open floor plans also destroy the efficiency as the heat goes up which made your already inefficient heating even worse.

Combine both together and you probably have 5% efficiency.

A ceiling fan works really well for this

An open fire is not a particularly warm thing to have unless you’re directly in front of it. Most of the heat goes straight up the flue, and it uses an enormous amount of air to keep burning - it will pull huge volumes from rvertwhere it can. This is why these old buildings didn’t suffer from damp issues - the open fires burning were ventilating them.

It's the same problem as those portable AC units: the exhaust (chimney in this case) draws large amounts of air in from outside which is at the wrong temperature (cold in this case).

At some point they realised and the newer ones have a dupex air duct so you can keep air pressure even

Huh, just like a balanced flue.

If it has a flue or chimney, it isnt really an open fire. Look at an ancient long house, or farmer's thatched cottage from say 400 years ago. They had a fire on a stone circle on the floor in the middle of the room, and a high roof sometimes with a hole but often not. It was smoky, but kept everyone warm.

There have been times, with various crises, where I only half considered if indoor plumbing was such a great thing. But that's probably a very old-fashioned New England thing.

It gave people lung cancer, too. Maybe genetic adaptation to that (pretty toxic) environment is why smoking doesn't kill people more quickly.

I think before heating without smoke, it was perfectly sensible to smoke tobacco because it was the least bad thing you were inhaling on a daily basis, and you were likely going to die of lung cancer regardless. Makes sense we didn’t really discover the risk until after we stopped using wood burning stoves (or burning coal, like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s mother would to in Little House when it was available)

Sorry, it’s not a topic I know an awful lot about. I was talking about an exposed hearth with a chimney like in the article, as opposed to a cast iron unit that recirculates the air like a stove

the fresh air inlet should be piped along the chimney walls, this would also recover the condensation heat of the water produced during combustion, but its not trivial to design while keeping in mind things like maintenance, different chimney column temperature (and thus different convective forces), capturing and effluence of the condensed water, ... the heated fresh air should not directly go to the fire but piped into the room.

Did you use a fire grate with a big space underneath and keep it swept clean? Or did you build up a big bed of ash under the grate? On the advice of a chimney sweep I put a perimeter of bricks under the grate to form walls and we're currently filling it with more and more ash (it really takes a while). It's starting to make a difference in how much heat comes back into the room. Without that void underneath, the fire doesn't burn so hot and cold air doesn't get pulled through so quickly.

(It feels like it's getting warmer - may all be wishful thinking though, I haven't taken any measurements!)

Some highlights of this rubbish article

> Pretty much all the fireplaces I see are also built on the central spine of the building, meaning not much heat would be lost to the windows or exterior wall.

Or maybe because, as the first half of the article say, it is because the outside walls have nowhere to put a fireplace, because they are covered in windows?

> he told me it can feel around 10C (18F) warmer inside on a cold winter's day. Other, typical Elizabethan houses, he estimates, would have only feel 2-3C (3.6-5.4F) warmer.

It 'feels' warmer...he 'estimates'. Nice way to do science

> Since it's winter, and cold, I move my desk to a south-eastern window. It brightens the mornings and if I wear another layer, I find I can lower the thermostat by 2C (3.6F).

More good science, change two variables but attribute the effect to only one of them. If I wear another layer of clothing, move my desk to the basement, sacrifice a goat, speak in tongues and draw a pentacle on the floor, I can turn the thermostat down 2 degrees too.

But let's start at the top

>England's longest river was usually flowing freely

Then list lots of evidence that it was not at all unusual for it to freeze at the time.

Great work

The river Thames in the Kingdom of England ( ~950 AD -> now +/- various other countries ) usually was freely flowing - just as the article states.

The article takes a long view of time, stretching back to at least the founding of London, the capital city, two thousand and more years past on the banks of that very river.

There was a relatively short period of time when the Thames did freeze in winter and England was much colder, this article talks about a chunky bit of architecture during that period.

The windows are discussed wrt their thermal effects, allowing the sun in to heat central stone during the day on one side of the building, likely with heavy curtains at night, with windows blocked internally and largely for show on the rear.

You had me at ‘rubbish article’. There’s a bunch of Youtube content on this that’s far superior, example:

https://youtu.be/puzxeIvpgwg

https://youtu.be/SrC3wms8pQ8

The author is not a scientist publishing in a scientific journal, in case that wasn't clear from the domain.

You always this cranky and uncharitable?

I was speaking with an architect a few months ago and dismayed to learn that they no longer bother designing for thermal management (relying on air-conditioning alone). They are fully focused on the aesthetic "integration" of the structure in the landscape. (I use quotes for the word "integration" because it implies a harmonious coalescing across domains, including temperature.) Their prior work beautifully incorporated passive heating/cooling, much to the benefit of the clients' health and happiness. Where did this architect lose the thread?

I've noticed in general a thorough dismissal of passive benefits. It seems that we are caught by a cultural need for immediacy. Thermal management, and particularly passive thermal management, pays immense dividends slowly, but it takes a greater intelligence or broader perspective for anyone to appreciate these advantages.

Those who sit still and think clearly see the advantages of passive benefits, and anyone who gardens or does systems design intrinsically observes the long-term flows and thus understands the passive benefits at play. But so many people – from practitioners like the architect to stakeholders like their clients – go through life wholly unaware of this goldmine that is right there in front of their imagination.

> passive thermal management

I lived in an almost passive house for about a year. When the HVAC system stopped working* in July, I didn't notice until the middle of November.

* Air handler was running, compressor was off.

This just reminds me of a random discussion I had with a very close German friend.

He pointed out that Tado (who do smart radiator valves) noted from a study, which drew from their data, that the UK sucks at insulation, losing heat up to three times faster than other European neighbours[0].

[0] https://www.tado.com/en-gb/press/uk-homes-losing-heat-up-to-...

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated nor am I a customer of Tado. Also, I'm British and I just felt like commenting here because it felt relevant.

Now it makes sense to me. I live in central continental Europe but spent a month or so in the UK a couple years ago, and one of my immediate impressions was how much colder it felt inside buildings. The buildings themselves seemed thinner and made of less dense materials as well.

Right. My friend said to me, after visiting his sister and brother-in-law in the UK that "it's incredible, the houses there are made of shit". Sounds harsh and I reprimanded him but I think there's something to it.

I wonder if that correlates with the average age of houses. The UK has a lot of buildings that are well over 100 years old that can only be insulated by stuffing cavity walls full of an insulating material. My house is 126 years old, and despite my best efforts it's still terrible.

I'm very surprised to hear that such an old house has cavity walls. I would expect solid brick walls in Flemish bond. My house is 1970 and has them, they were much more common after the war.

Old Victorian terraces in the North East where I live have them because they were built by very wealthy shipyard owners so they could afford to put up high quality housing, and they needed something to keep out the damp. Cavity walls made from two layers of brick with iron ties were the solution.

Blimey, NE weather and on the water as well, that's a tough heating/insulation job!

I would suspect so, but a lot of the stock since then isn't that much better. There was a lot of building up to the 60s but they weren't exactly well regarded for quality. And new builds have a bad reputation now for similar reasons, as even though the minimum standards have risen they're still not particularly great (and especially not a very good tradeoff between quality and cost).

Well that's full of really useful tips. I'll get the builders in to construct a 1.37m (4.5ft) thick spine through the middle of my house. Obviously.

You're missing out if you don't have such thick mass of warm brick/stone. If you only knew how great it is to sleep on top of it (my grandmother had similar to that in her house :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_stove

Modern fire codes require large space between a stove and walls which is usually goes unused where it could have been really filled with such a thick brick structure with the smoke passage snaking through it like in Russian and German stoves. Or like this:

https://www.mha-net.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2020/05...

Fire codes in the UK would allow a stove as close to the wall as you would like

Modern insulation is really, really good, and modern heatpumps are very energy efficient and don't pollute your house with CO, CO2, and particulate matter like woodsmoke. Also, modern double- or triple-pane windows insulate much better than drafty Elizabethan windows. We live in a time of marvels.

You're talking about the best of what's available but that is rarely what builders use and retrofitting your already constructed house to use these could end up costing you 1/3 or more of your home's original value.

All that is to say that builders cheap out on new home construction so most people don't get to enjoy the benefits if these innovations.

Um, nobody builds a house without modern insulation (rock wool etc) and 3-pane windows. It wouldn't be legal either.

That depends where you are. Here in Australia the default is single glazed windows, and double glazed is hideously expensive, especially to retrofit.

Sounds you're somewhere with some actual building standards though.

Also in australia, the BCC/NCA is an absolute joke compared to basically every other industrialized country. There’s a reason for the annual “Austrlian houses dont meet WHO minimum standards” articles.

As an example single pane windows havent been effective or widely used since the 70-80s in north america and europe. And both places energy standards effectively preclude them since 2000ish. Or insulation in australia is effectively absent in pre 2000s, and maybe R-4ish on a new build now. Conversely NA was R-4 in the 70-80s and it would be about R-6 (or more) these days.

Our residential solar and heat pump uptake is great. But for building standards and quality were a joke.

Build, no. But here in New England (Boston suburbs) even double-pane windows are still quite rare, because most houses are ~100 years old or more.

Windows have a lifetime of only 15-30 years, though. If you have to replace them anyway, you might as well get double-pane (even if the rest of the house isn't well insulated).

What does 'lifetime' mean? Mine are nearly all original.

Windows last hundreds of years because glass lasts hundreds of years.

Modern windows don't last very long, because the seals leak, and the argon gas or whatever leaks out. The glass is still good, but the insulative quality is gone.

The parent poster didn't realize that if you don't have double pane windows, you have single pane windows, which have no gas to leak.

Even if it's mostly air it insulates quite a bit better than single pane windows. Of course worse than with the original gas filling, as the windows are optimized for maximum distance between the glass panes without having the inner gas start to "circulate" - which starts to happen at a smaller distance for air than for the noble gasses.

Yes, for sure. My house is 65 years old, and all the windows have leaked.

But my point was that windows, the glass part, lasts centuries, if not longer. Not the mere decades cited upstream.

That is the stated lifetime - but they typically last much longer.

I live in the UK and nobody is replacing windows every 15 years. 30 _maybe_

I think this is the stated lifetime of insulated windows. But obviously single glazed windows were never insulated in the first place so there is no practical lifetime on them...

In my house and on my road a lot of the glass is 150+ years old.

Haha. Made of what? Come on, around here there are plenty of wooden doors and windows 70-100 yo and this is a humid climate.

I live in Edinburgh, and 100 year old buildings are the newest ones in the city. A good chunk of the city is what we call a “conservation area” - so you can’t modify the aesthetic of the building (windows included), but the vast vast vast majority of people outside that space have double glazed windows I’d wager.

Not sure where you live, but all of that stuff is minimum code in new construction where I live. And it is inspected.

In the UK it's minimum code and we don't bother to inspect. We trust the building firms to self-certify, with predictable results...

the modern way of doing that is ICF - insulated concrete forms.

I remember talking to a builder once who was building a house this way. He said the mass wasn't allowed to be advertised with an R-value since it wasn't actually insulation, but he said it was comparable to an R-50 house.

ICF homes are also VERY air tight. They often need special variable output heating and cooling.

I had trouble with my heating system and got a good long talk with the HVAC pro.

I think variable output heating/cooling has one interesting capability - it can adjust to things you've adjusted. For example, a one or two-stage heating system has trouble if you close heating vents in some rooms. It might overheat if too many are closed for example. With a variable-output system, it can support this. further with variable dampers it can support zoned heating and cooling. You can give the places that need it less or more airflow and have a more comfortable house without waste.

after seeing things like heatermeter (pid controlled smoker controller based on the raspberry pi), I wonder why this kind of convenient and efficient control isn't more common.

Most high quality modern homes are built to be air tight and bring air in with exchangers. Monopoly framing is how they are approaching this with stick frame houses. They essentially create what looks like a building from the game Monopoly (no overhangs) with air tight materials and tape every hole they can find. They will install a blower door and measure how much air leaks from the building envelope. The overhanging features are installed outside of the air tight monopoly frame.

This is what a monopoly framed house looks like before the roof and siding are put on: https://www.afirsttimehomebuilder.com/img/pure_monopoly_fram...

All of the Zip boards are air and water tight and they use the tape on all of the seams to seal those. The roof will sit on top of the already water & air tight frame. Same with the siding.

It takes a LOT of effort to make stick framed homes as air tight as ICF houses automatically are.

ICF is great but it's still uncommon. Most contractors know nothing about it.

Passive solar houses do exactly this. But you're fundamentally right, it's not really a retrofit. It's a goal you set for the next house.

Related to the Maunder Minimum, named after my namesakes: Astronomer Walter Maunder and his wife Annie Maunder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum

And here's more info on The Little Ice Age: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

Debatable as to whether solar activity was a contributor to The Little Ice Age.

What did you think about the point in the article suggesting millions of people dying on South America caused the earth to cool down due to reforestation absorbing more green house gas. I find this hard to believe.

There was a noticable (and well recorded) change in the climate for awhile when Ghenghis Khan went on his rampage. And he was a lot less effective at killing people than novel old world diseases.

It doesn’t seem completely implausible.

Correlation vs causation?

Not sure how you could run an A/B test on the planet, really.

What a strange question.

Yep cheap energy and modern building techniques made us lose a lot of the common sense of yesterday.

Good thing initiatives like the passive house institute are bringing back some of these principles, you can easily cut a modern home heating/cooling needs by 70%+ by following simples rules

Passive house thinking comes from an era of peak oil concerns, no solar, and no heat pumps. None of those conditions holds anymore. Further, passive houses are notorious for overheating and because they’re so airtight they require expensive mechanical ventilation and make-up air systems unless you want indoor air pollution problems.

People building houses today are much better served by spending their money on solar + battery + heat pumps than going passive.

But any modern house is too airtight and essentially requires ERV.

Which brings us to next interesting problem - you would think that ERV should be built-in into modern cooling/heating systems, but it’s no the case.

Yes, it's one of the cheapest way to reduce your energy needs and have clean air, plus it's fairly low tech system

ERV = Energy Recovery Ventilator

Also, they usually hook up the interior air intakes to bathrooms so smells and extra humidity have a constant flow out of your house.

Solar is still not free or unlimited. A well designed house will be more comfortable and save energy over its whole life while costing a fraction more than a badly designed house.

It's better no matter the heat source really. And it allows you to do without central heating and/or complex heating techs which are more annoying to maintain and replace

> expensive mechanical ventilation

A top of the line heat recovery ventilation unit cost the same as a shit tier air/air heat pump and has no moving parts besides the fans, which are cheap and easy to replace.

You can even make reasonably efficient heat exchangers at home with corrugated plastic sheets...

> because they’re so airtight they require expensive mechanical ventilation and make-up air systems unless you want indoor air pollution problems.

Most modern homes have this issue. Building science has driven them to be air tight bubbles. Look at blower door tests on current construction and a lot of "building science" driven construction.

It's still miles ahead of having literal holes in your window frames to let "fresh air" come in when it's -20c outside.

All you need to do is design a house with a sensible ventilation system, which costs virtually nothing compared to the rest of the building costs. It's even more stupid for americans because they already all have complex ventilation system...

>It's even more stupid for americans because they already all have complex ventilation system

Maybe for newer houses. I have an older house and I don't have a ventilation system. Forced radiator hot water heat and no AC in New England.

you need FAR less solar+battery for passive house tho. And AC in summer is essentially free. Of course, it all depends on area, if winters barely have any snow and summers are very hot the benefits of very insulated house are much slimmer

The old houses didn't overheat because the floor wasn't insulated all that well so the cold came from below. We could do something similar by just mounting heat pump ground loop under the house, before it is built, but today house developers want it cheap and quick so you pretty much can't find much of that and would have to do it on your own.

Other interesting system is using underground as a way to cool house air intake, just running pipes underground for several metres to get it to cool down in summer and heat up a bit in winter. But again, expensive thing compared to "just add more solar panels/battery storage and let AC handle it"

Ever more complex systems/technology are fine for some and not for others. Some people care about simplicity and the ability to maintain and repair the system themselves.

Modern insulation and windows are a passive heating/cooling technique.

> Fireplaces were strategically arranged so minimal heat would be lost to the outer walls

I'm always a little confused by radiators placed underneath windows in modern buildings. I'm sure it evens out cold spots, but it sends a lot of heat right outside.

I think a lot of those old central heat systems you couldn't actually control the heat, being able to lose a lot of heat to the window if you wanted was probably a feature. I was watching a video on old soviet blocks in cold areas and it sounded like it really sucked to live too close to the central heater and have to deal with super hot houses

I lived on the top floor of a 12 story dorm with radiators. Everyone on our floor would have the windows open all the time. When it was warm out, we needed any fresh air. When it was cold out, the radiators would be so hot, the fresh air balanced it. Down about 6th floor was nice though.

But, to answer the OP, putting conditioning on the perimiter of the building keeps the interior temperature gradient minimal. If you deliver conditioning to the center of the building, the perimeter approaches outside temperatures (depending) and you have a big gradient and much less comfort. There's also better heat transfer when you deliver conditioning at bigger delta T, which pushes towards the perimeter as well... But it means more ducting/piping. And if you're using fireplaces for heat, it's complex because classically fireplaces pull in air from the conditioned space, and make up air comes from outside, you really want that fire to warm up surfaces to get radiative heat; burying it in the center of the building will be better than having it off in the corner; but it you use outside air for combustion, you can put it on the perimeter.

It stops drafts from the window before they reach occupants. Yes, it is less efficient in terms of total heat inside the structure, but its more effective at avoiding uncomfortably cold spots, which is (in most places at most times of year) more important, plus, the utility lost to the occupied under-window space is less than the utility that would be lost for the same space elsewhere; the window already limiting alternate uses.

No furniture in front of the window.

This was deliberate engineering to bring in fresh air. After the 1918 Flu, there was a desire for more fresh air inside homes. All of the apartments I lived in Chicago were built decades later, but the radiator layout persists.

Article[0] on it

  I’ve heard a story, and I don’t know if it’s an urban legend, that steam heat became popular after the 1918 flu pandemic because it was going to force overheating of units and make people open their windows and let the bad air out.

  I’ve never heard it put that way, but the flu pandemic had a huge impact on heating systems, because they actually changed the code requirements for heating systems when the pandemic was around, because they didn’t know what was causing this. They thought there was something in the air that was causing this. And so what they did is they started requiring buildings to be ventilated. Essentially, they changed the requirements for heating buildings so you had to maintain 70 degrees in the building with all the windows open in the sleeping rooms. So people see these great big huge radiators and think that that’s what they have to have in the house. Usually, the reason those radiators are so big is because they had to heat the house with windows open.

[0] https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/a-history-of-radiators-...

Edit: switched out to different article focused on Chicago

When the cold air coming from the window drops, it pushes the rising hot air out into the room. Overall loss of heat, but feels better for the human occupants long term.

Offices that use air handlers and VAVs also have narrow VAV zones along all perimeter windows. It’s for comfort, windows are where the most heat is lost/gained so heating or cooling those zones makes the space more comfortable for the people inside those areas.

I lived in a house for a bit with a bedroom was in the northeast corner of the house, and the radiator was on an inside wall. The only convenient spot for the bed was the exterior corner.

On more than one occasion, I found my bedsheets completely frosted stuck to the wall.

Brits will do anything except properly insulate their damn homes.

And make a bathroom practical and enjoyable. Sink with hot and cold tap, electric water heater in shower, come on...

I don't think I've ever been in a UK home that didn't have these, except perhaps the electric shower; older homes may still use immersion heating for hot water.

Were you in prison when you experienced the above?

My last year Airbnb experiences in Scotland. I could not believe my eyes it still existed (I used to go often in the UK in the past).

Brits, Dutch, Belgium, Northern Germany. They all have this incredibly outdated building style that they refuse to change. Bricks with no insulation. I live 1000km to the south of them and it is pretty standard for us to have tripple pane windows and thick insulation on our houses. But they for some reason prefer to live in cold houses during the winter and overheated houses during the summer.

I have had multiple conversations with people who lived a while in that area. Rich, educated countries, modern economies, but they live like they are poor farmers in the 19th century.

British building regs literally require insulation? It is not a law that old builds have to be brought up to code, but there were government schemes where you got free loft and cavity wall insulation in old houses.

This has not been true for at least a decade for dutch buildings: there are strict regulations requiring decent insulation for new buildings. Renovating and insulating old buildings is also encouraged, but not required by law.

Insulating old buildings and especially appartment buildings is very common over here. There the amount of uninsulated buildings is so much higher. Every time I am in that part of Europe I am appalled at the energy waste.

I think the buildings really are that old - you can't legally build new ones like that in the EU afaik. No idea about Britain, but yeah, I lived there in a flat like that, it was over 100 years old.

Purely anecdotal, but every house I have ever visited in the Netherlands and Scandinavia has been properly heated and above all insulated. Which is absolutely not the case for the UK and even less so for France and countries further "south". If you want to be cold indoors in Europe, spend a winter in Spain, Portugal, Italy or Greece. Here I speak with some experience.

Hasn’t been true in like 50 years, at least in new builds, even conversions. We have building standards too you know

> at least in new builds

It appears that something like 50% of homes are still over 50 years old, which seems to be more than enough for “some subset of brits large enough to be notable complain about the cold weather because they don't have a properly insulated place to warm up in” to have explanatory power.

It's an interesting article on this one particular mansion, but the idea that "the same tricks for more efficient heating can be used in modern designs" seems pretty silly.

We don't use fireplaces anymore (a major "trick" being to put them in the middle of the house rather than in the exterior walls), and while using large windows to capture sunlight and heat works great in the winter, it also leads to overheating in the summer and thus more energy for air conditioning.

> These are modest changes, imperceptible to most, and they won't enable us to forgo active heating and cooling entirely. But they do echo a way of thinking which, today, is oft ignored. Hardwick Hall was designed with Sun, season and temperature in mind.

Everyone I know who has built a house has thought very much about sun, season and temperature. This is very much a factor in determining the sizes and quantity of windows on south-facing vs. north-facing walls, for example.

Again, it's a very interesting article on this one particular castle, but the idea that it has something to teach modern architects and builders is pure fantasy. We're already well aware of all these factors and how they interact with materials and design.

> while using large windows to capture sunlight and heat works great in the winter

That's what awnings (or solar overhangs, or light shelves) are for. You block the high/hot summer sun but let in the low/cool winter sun.

> the idea that it has something to teach modern architects and builders is pure fantasy

Isn't the idea of mcmansions that they co opt smart classic design ideas, but use them in a manner which doesn't let them fulfill their function purpose(skeuomorphism)? So someone certainly has some things to learn

> That's what awnings (or solar overhangs, or light shelves) are for.

Right, this is my point. We already think about these things.

> Isn't the idea of mcmansions

I don't think McMansions, or whatever your favorite example of bad architecture is, shows that we've somehow lost knowledge. Architects and builders are aware of all of these things, but that doesn't mean there aren't still clients who want less energy-efficient designs for all sorts of reasons, like aesthetics.

We know how to build energy-efficient buildings that are appropriate for the location and seasons. We also know how to build buildings for other purposes, and are aware of the tradeoffs in how they use more energy. Energy conservation isn't the only goal in home design.

I think the idea with McMansions is that they are just tacky. Poorly aped styles. Columns that don’t do anything and are proportioned wrong for the load they are intended to look like they carry. Complex roofs that do nothing useful but “look fancy”. 100% style over substance, but with style that snooty people look down on.

I imagine that McMansions are generally about as energy efficient (per square foot) as other contemporary homes, though.

It feeds into people’s desire to feel superior. “You and me, dear reader, we’re two of the very few smart ones in a sea of incompetents.”

It's not like the wisdom is lost, it's just ignored in modern builds.

All architects think about siting and solar exposure. But the builders are in charge, and they optimize for what the market responds to -- which does not always include factors like these which contribute to long-term comfort and livability.

So I would say that consumers could learn a thing or two. That said, most buyers are not buying newly-built homes, so their ability to influence the inclusion of some of these features are limited.

The industry is downstream of market demands. If customers aren't aware enough to demand smart things, builders will skip them to save money, or to optimize for more visible features. Same old story.

Even when the buyer is buying a newly built house, it's often already built or being built off of already existing plans that do not take these things into account.

Exactly. You can’t have two houses on opposite sides of the street that are perfect copies without some compromise somewhere.

> So I would say that consumers could learn a thing or two. That said, most buyers are not buying newly-built homes, so their ability to influence the inclusion of some of these features are limited.

Even then I think Americans are not at all well-versed in what makes a house a good house in terms of design or aesthetic and there isn’t a marketplace that exists to help customers shop and compare.

Today, if you’re buying a new build your only option is McMansion style or just a smaller and equally distasteful version of the McMansion. And yes they are all distasteful - it’s a matter of fact, not opinion.

So most people buying new builds end up with the same cargo culled designs. And then “architects” design more and more different versions of these horrendous designs and plop in things like Sedona Avenue near the golf course and that’s how you get suburbia. There’s never a market signal, despite the fact that we can build homes much more nicely and with techniques to be a little more naturally energy efficient and kinder on the eyes.

There is also much less competition with neighborhood design though surprisingly there have been some inroads there that have fostered some competition, but it’s mostly for now for the wealthy. I live in a neighborhood designed before cars, a neighborhood that today is largely illegal to build. But the home prices are highest here because the market is demanding this type of neighborhood - single family detached homes mixed with apartments and coffee shops and small offices and restaurants. “Mixed-use development”. It’s incredibly scarce and in most American cities it has the most expensive average real estate and tends to be the most economically vibrant. Little pockets of Europe.

Neither home builders or zoning officials have taste and because as you in my view correctly acknowledge the builders are downstream of market demands, because the market doesn’t even understand what is actually good and possible, the entire industry and government regulation apparatus is downstream of the sewer.

Or it is set out in building codes that they must design in a certain way.

In the UK that means adding lots of insulation. UK houses predominantly had a lot of thermal mass from the inner skin of the cavity wall being brick or later concrete blocks. The little wall insulation, if it even existed, was in the cavity. In a push for more insulation they switched to lightweight thermal blocks, and sometimes more insulation inside, or timber frames. All of which designed for insulation while reducing the thermal mass. No matter how much sun you put in during the day you only heat the air, which goes cold quickly. This is not the architects choice.

Architects can only design for orientation on a single house plot. In the UK they are trying to cram houses on at 50 to the acre or more due to the price of building land. They focus on best use of space, rather than orientation because of that

> > It's not like the wisdom is lost, it's just ignored in modern builds.

> Or it is set out in building codes that they must design in a certain way.

An anecdote: Two decades ago in college in the US, I knew several people doing Architecture. One day in one of their dorm rooms, one of them went on this long rant about how modern codes ignore environmental factors and just require certain things no matter the climate.

I don't know how universal her experience was, but I can see these two lines I quoted as both happening, just in reverse - the building codes are causing loss of knowledge/wisdom.

And if they are not used it's more of question of price and other available options and not "the modern architects forgot".

Making what's essentially "an insulated box" is far more universal climate-wise than most of the old methods, because what's good in summer (north-facing windows, good airflow, getting some cold from the ground) is terrible for winter and vice versa. And where it is useful, it IS used, just instead of fireplace having big thermal mass we have floor heating where the concrete floor is the heat storage (and sometimes extra tank of water)

And every method to make it "better" directly competes with "just buy more solar/battery to run heat pump cheaper.

> and while using large windows to capture sunlight and heat works great in the winter, it also leads to overheating in the summer and thus more energy for air conditioning.

A lot of contemporary energy-efficient designs slope the windows now such that light can enter in the winter but not the summer, but in the past this problem would have been remedied with awnings.

> Everyone I know who has built a house has thought very much about sun, season and temperature.

I've lived in houses that certainly did not take into account sun, season and temperature. I learned a lot from that experience. My current house is optimized for it. I've learned a few more things about it, and could do better.

> the idea that it has something to teach modern architects and builders is pure fantasy

Not my experience with architects and builders.

For example, how many houses have a cupola? They're common on older homes, but non-existent on modern ones. What the roof does is accelerate the wind moving over the roof, then the air vents in the cupola let the wind through, which sucks the heat out of the attic.

Another design element is eaves. Eaves shade the house in summer and don't shade it in winter (for more heat gain). Eaves also keep the sides of the house dry, which means your siding and paint and window frames last a lot longer. Mine are 1.5 feet. Most houses around here have tiny or even non-existent eaves.

The advent of air-conditioning is when architects stopped paying attention to the sun.

> For example, how many houses have a cupola? They're common on older homes, but non-existent on modern ones. What the roof does is accelerate the wind moving over the roof, then the air vents in the cupola let the wind through, which sucks the heat out of the attic.

This one is genuinely obsolete. With modern techniques, it’s straightforward to build a reliable unvented attic, and there are few if any climates where a vented attic makes sense. There are plenty of climates where a vented attic, even a nice one with a cupola, is massively inferior to an unvented, conditioned attic.

Seal and condition your attic. Put on a decorative cupola if you like. If you live in a place with heavy snow load, you vent a small gap between the top of your attic and your roof surface to help keep the actual roof surface cold enough to avoid melting the snow.

I've been in an attic many times on a sunny day. The heat in the attic is well above what it is outside. I'm highly skeptical that an unvented attic is going to keep a house cool in summer.

Me too. But have you been in a competently built insulated and unvented attic? The insulation on top makes an enormous difference, to the point that the attic can usually maintain a very pleasant temperature.

While it’s true that the top side of above-attic insulation will be rather warmer than a vented attic on a hot sunny day, insulation on top of your attic also tends to work rather better than ceiling insulation. And there are plenty of other benefits to an unvented, insulated attic.

Interesting! But having a sealed attic makes me concerned about mildew. Ventilation is needed to keep the moisture out.

Au contraire.

If you live in a climate where the outdoor air is generally fairly dry and also sufficiently warm that it spends most of its time above the interior dewpoint, then fine. You can vent our attic and it stays dry. This covers rather little of the world.

If you do not insulate at all and you heat your house when it’s cold or wet and you do not experience hot and humid weather, then there will be enough heat flow to keep your attic dry. This is generally an awful idea, but old insulated houses did work in many climates.

If you live somewhere cold and put fluffy stuff on your ceiling and you vent your attic and you have air leaks in your ceiling (hint: this is basically unavoidable) and it’s very cold in your attic, you may get condensation in the ceiling insulation or the attic. Mold time.

If you live somewhere hot and humid and you vent your attic, then you are are filling your attic with hot, humid air. Your dehumidifier or A/C will not control your attic humidity. But your A/C may cool parts of your attic, leading to additional condensation.

If you have nasty severe blowing rain, it may blow into your attic, leading to damage. This is a problem in hurricanes.

Wildfire embers can ignite the inside of your attic. You can try to use fancy supposedly ember resistant vents to mitigate this, or you can omit vents entirely.

If you seal your attic and control moisture in the living spaces well enough to avoid moisture problems and you have adequate conditioning in your attic, your attic will be about the same temperature and humidity as your living spaces, and you’ll be fine.

You can geek out at buildingscience.com. The author appears to have become increasingly convinced that vented attics are basically never the answer.

All I can say is my attic is vented, and is dry and free of mold.

Ridge vent is the modern approach, with vents and wind baffles in the eaves so air is evenly distributed.

1.5' overhang is good, 2' is ideal. Cheap builders will go 1' or even less.

Good architects still pay attention to the sun. It's often builders who are the culprits because they want to save money.

Around Seattle, modern houses are square boxes with a flat roof, and zero eaves. I watch these homes get built all the time. A few years later, I see all the water damage to the siding.

You're right about ridge vents, they behave much like a cupola, but the holes in them are too small for much airflow, and are easily blocked by debris, insects and moss.

> easily blocked

That's a concern. It may be a good idea to put a connected thermometer and hygrometer in the attic. If it is ventilating properly, the temperature and humidity should be close to outdoor values.

Forced ventilation of the attic creates negative pressure in the attic, which pulls conditioned air from the house. The additional air movement (which you should minimize with air sealing) costs more than the additional loses by the mildly increased temperature differential through the insulation.

If you aren't using A/C and have the windows open, then it only helps, of course.

The idea includes gaps where the roof meets the ceiling, so air is drawn from outside.

> If you aren't using A/C and have the windows open, then it only helps, of course.

I make use of the "stack effect" to cool the house down in the evening. Not even a fan is necessary.

One mistake I made was to not have the A/C pull from the basement, which is always 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the house.

> The idea includes gaps where the roof meets the ceiling, so air is drawn from outside.

Of course you should have soffit venting, but forced ventilation results in negative pressure, regardless of whether that venting is a cupola harnessing the wind or a motorized fan. That negative pressure will pull conditioned air out and building science research shows higher attic temperatures are better than forced ventilation.

Even better is larger amounts of passive ventilation, but if the only thing you change is adding forced ventilation, then you're creating negative pressure and this is worse if using A/C.

Unless you have really good insulation, in hotter areas, your roof will absorb a lot of heat and that gets transferred to the attic and then to the rest of the house. One of the cheapest and best upgrades in hotter areas is to have an attic fan and vents to send the hot attic air outside.

> attic fan

The cupola does that using the "stack effect" and the acceleration of the wind as it hits the sloping roof, at zero cost!

That said, I do have an attic fan connected to a thermostat. I'd rather have a cupola, though.

Building science shows this is not true if you use A/C and have appropriate amount of ceiling insulation. Inadequate ceiling insulation is helped by this.

>a major "trick" being to put them in the middle of the house rather than in the exterior wall

I vised Löwenburg in Kassel which has bedrooms with similar curtains around the bed. Much later (1891) and with other heating technology of note. I was intrigued by the fireplace design in the room immediately behind the bed. The open fire is backed by a huge granite block built into the wall. The room had a close connection to servant stairways directly down to the exterior.

The guide describe the otherwise plain room as a dressing room. It looked like a convenient place to store a lot of firewood to stoke the fireplace attached to the bed behind it to me.

> Scandinavian cabins, despite lacking modern insulation, maintain warmth in sub-zero temperatures. This video explores centuries-old building techniques, comparing their performance against modern homes. Discover the surprising physics principles behind their resilience and energy efficiency.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVqwiMtoDhk

I live not far from Hardwick Hall, drive past it frequently, and have visited it a few times. Learned a lot of of new stuff about it from this article, thanks.

"King Henry VIII and his queen"

Someone appears to have had a bit of fun being unspecific

The big about textiles (curtains and bed fabric) functioning as insulation gave me flashbacks to my dad repeatedly complaining over the past decade about a couple small boxes of my stuff taking up space he "needs" in his 700 sqft attic.

I told him, "What's the big deal? It's free insulation during brutal north Texas summers. It's as good as vermiculite insulation minus the asbestos contamination!"

I only put about as much rigor into this as reddit PC builders making untested "gut calls" about thermodynamics, and I was mostly just being a smartass, but it's nice to see I had the same idea as English nobility who comfortably survived winters before the invention of HVAC as we know it.

Nice to see some proof I'm not completely full of crap.

I envision even simpler and more practical thing, under-the-floor heating with addition of disposal water.

Me and my wife are taking shower daily, hers being hotter than mine (apparently that's common difference between female & male).

Every time, I am thinking that so much heat is going down the drain as waste, why not circulate this under the bathroom floor until it cools down.

Since we have a tub, I usually close the drain, sit/stand on a bench above the tub, rinse thoroughly at the end, keeping hot water afloat for next 20 minutes.

Since tub itself absorbs the heat, even after I open the drain and let go all the water, tub itself stays warmy for an hour or so.

Energy efficiency can seem counter intuitive.

A great example is the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. At first glance, the building seems to be a giant rectangular box made of glass. Hardly ideal in the long, hot Arkansas summers.

It’s not the truth, though. In reality, the building is said to be highly efficient and was the first Federal building to be LEED certified. Amazing.

I guess we’ve learned a few things over the years.

https://www.clintonlibrary.gov/about-us/leed-certified-build...

Or go solar with a battery, or just have a massive battery hooked into your distribution panel and leave the 19th century heating hacks in the 19th century. Optimize what you need for today, not whatever was state of the art 200 years ago. An electric space heater running continuously is enough in an emergency.

I don't think you understand how much power electric heaters use and how poorly solar converts to electric heat BTUs. A heat pump would be better.

Heat pump requires massive investment with ROI only when you are home. Solar stores the heat as electrical power and you can release it whenever you want.

> An electric space heater running continuously is enough in an emergency.

Yeah, massive battery and massive solar install might let it run continuously… even in a small well insulated house that’s gonna be using a lot of power to heat a room or two.

If it's really cold outside, an electric heater isn't going to do much if your house doesn't have good insulation. It'll be cranking away on high 24/7 and the room will still be cold. Building direction, window choice, room design, etc all contribute to the overall thermal efficiency so that the space heater can be effective.

I'm pretty sure humans understood taking advantage of sunlight to warm structures since the earliest structures. Most animals understand the sunlight/shade difference. The aztecs, egyptians, etc..

Apropos the information box, I don’t believe that the European colonisation of the New World was a cause of the Little Ice Age. A claim that bold should really show it’s workings.

>to keep temperatures cosier through the winter without turning up the thermostat.

Point of a thermostat is to not have to do this.

Requires a well calibrated heating system though, depending on outside temperature.

> The house has lessons for how we can heat our homes more efficiently today

The problem in Europe isn't keeping warm in the winter but keeping cool in the summer. In part thanks to their near-total lack of AC in residential buildings, Europe has an extremely high heat-related death rate. 200k people per year die of heatstroke in Europe: this accounts for 36% of global heat-related deaths. This is despite Europe being only 9% of the world population, having a very cool climate in comparison to India and similar countries, and being among the richest regions in the world.

Most of the tricks seem like they'd work in the cooling direction too. They amount to insulation and thermal mass. You would need AC to actually lower the temperature, but those improvements would let you run the cooling on a lower duty cycle.

Even parts of the US that have AC standard have learned to lean on it so hard that they've lost architectural features which, 50-100 years ago, kept a house cooler in Summer.

I once lived in a rental house in a "historical" neighborhood (on US timelines, not European) in a big city, and most of the houses had porches on two or three sides, depending on the cardinal orientation. These kept sunlight from falling directly on main body of the house, and strategically placed windows let you open two or three and get a breeze through the whole house.

We learned this visiting a neighbor who owned their home. The rental was not as well-maintained: some of the window frames had been painted shut over decades of touchups, but we never thought much of it. The day we jimmied them open and experienced a true cross-breeze through the living room was a HUGE "Aha!" moment.

Setting aside porches, even simple features like awnings above windows (esp. second-story windows) have fallen out of fashion, but they can reduce the demand on indoor AC significantly. They save money, but people think they look old-fashioned or something like that.

My local HVAC guy joked with me that the next Bezos/Musk billionaire type is going to be the guy who runs an HVAC company in Europe.

Europe is pretty big and varied.

>The problem in Europe isn't keeping warm in the winter but keeping cool in the summer. In part thanks to their near-total lack of AC in residential buildings,

The times they are a-changing. Every house on my 21 year old estate came with ac. I'd assume the same for newer constructions. People rarely use it due to the price of electricity. Temps get well over 30C for a couple of weeks in august.

> 200k people per year die of heatstroke in Europe

Extremely doubtful. Even Teh Grauniad disagrees.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/17/human-ma...

Note that the Grauniad figures include some very unusual heat waves. There's no way the normal average could be a lot higher in years that were a lot colder.

I live in Europe. My house gets too warm maybe 1 week of the year. I bought a big floor standing fan and it fixed that.

30 degrees Centigrade is exceptional here.

Whereas in other parts of Europe it gets much hotter. Probably best not to generalise over a whole continent that covers 36 degrees of latitude (more than the contiguous 48 states of the US, at about 25 degrees), and goes from islands sat in the Gulf Stream to land sat next to an even larger land mass.

I don’t know how many people have homes with 4.5 ft thick walls. Adobe houses in the Southwest US were similar in design with thick walls.

The central spine of the building, 1.4m of stone or brick, could probably help cool a house, as well.

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