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Comment by freetime2 | Hacker News Reader

For years I did this with the thermostat - something I learned from my father who always kept the house under 65F (18C) in Winter. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit it even led to arguments with my spouse early in our marriage when I would enter a room and find the thermostat set to a balmy 70F.

Eventually I just sat down, looked at how much it costs keep the house a few degrees warmer in winter, and realized we could afford to be comfortable. And if I were really hell bent on saving money, there were other lower-priority expenses I could cut back on first. But I don't even think it was even necessarily about the money - it was more that saving energy and toughing it out felt virtuous to me. Which is all fine, but not something that should be imposed on your partner if they don't share the same beliefs (or if they just get cold easier than you).

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Funny, I went the other way round in the Bay Area. PG&E bills were so high so it was the choice of putting on a jacket or paying $1k extra over the winter months. And my reasoning was "I can afford a jacket".

I think I would still take that option, at least partially! Our gas bills where I am have gotten awful in recent years after the gas company separated from it's parent and all the homes (apartments) around here have god awful insulation since they're 80-150 years old.

I bought some fleece sweatpants for $40 and the amount I was able to keep my home unheated was totally fine and I made that money back within that month.

Also the cost of apartment-friendly insulation paid for itself immediately as well (which wouldn't apply to most decent apartments).

Where I live these days, it's 50/50 heat included in rent versus not, and I have to remind my friends that literally all of the buildings they rent in are 50+ years old.

And if your landlord is balking at including heat in rent, there's a decent chance it's because your bill will be outrageous because there's zero insulation, and as a tenant there's little you can do to fix that.

I’m always colder in my mother’s house in Scotland (-5°C on cold days) than I am at my MIL’s house in the frozen Canadian wastelands (-40°C/F on cold days), because my mother will play games with thermostat to save money, where my MIL would simply die of exposure if the heating wasn’t on consistently for 6 months of the year.

There's also a very different type of cold close to the water. -40C will dry out your skin and make it feel like it's burning, but -5C in Scotland or on one of the Gulf Islands near Vancouver will make your bones feel frozen without good insulation.

You know those Christmas cards that show a frosty twinkly white treescape? That climate will kill you even at -5C.

People die on Ben Nevis every few years because they think its not that cold. But Scottish cold in that part of the world is brutal, there's so much moisture in the air that freezes if you get wet and cant quickly get dry you will die fast.

Still, it's a beautiful part of the country.

If the relative humidity is 100%, then being wet won't make you colder: the water has to evaporate in order to cool you, and it can't do that at 100% relative humidity. The problem that high humidity cold causes is increased convection, and the problem being wet causes is the dramatic near-complete loss of the insulation value of many garments.

There is a _lot_ of folk science about cold weather that is just plain wrong.

> The problem that high humidity cold causes is increased convection

Can you help me understand? How does higher relative humidity increase convection?

Humid air has higher heat capacity and higher heat conductivity than dry air which both increase convective heat loss.

All of that is true, but how does that relate to convection? That is the part I find puzzling.

I think he was talking about the weather conditions. Cold weather fronts with high humidity means strong winds.

I love the winter for this. My thermostat is set to 16C at night. I prefer if the heat never even kicks on, it’s noisy and disruptive to have air blowing through the vents. I wish there was AC that could make my house that cold at night while making no noise!

Going on your Slavic username: as an American who moved to a country without forced-air HVAC, it’s been quite a revelation to discover how backwards forced air really is.

Forced air is pretty necessary for air conditioning (cooling).

For heat, radiant is nicer. But most people don't want to pay to have two completely separate climate control infrastructures in their house.

Heat pumps, they are one piece of infrastructure that work for both heating and cooling as it's a symmetric process.

But you still need to move air for cooling (as opposed to using water for heating), because you can’t cause condensation during cooling without creating damage and health risks.

Hydronic (water transport) heat is great: extremely comfortable and quiet compared to forced hot air.

Air heat pump? I don’t notice the sound.

I had a home battery put in recently and switched over to wholesale power...and the most shocking thing has been how little power our reverse cycle air conditioners actually use. Like, we bought them for efficiency, but between solar panels and a battery I can actually just have them on all night and we might just barely run out if we had good sun that day.

Basically a bunch of technology has just crossed over to make being comfortable not just affordable, but visibly so (which would've been great when I was a kid - it made a huge difference when I hooked the power monitoring up for my dad and proved to him that he should just set the AC to a target temperature and the fastest fan speed he could stand the sound of and it would use less power...and he actually did it!)

I think if you want to keep it on the cold side, you can still do that. Builds character, isn't dangerous, and saves a couple of bucks. You can also keep it warm when you feel like being warm. There's something in human psychology about being able to endure discomfort and then come back to "safety".

> who always kept the house under 65F (18C)

And some of us literally have no choice. I need my home office to be under 18℃ in order to not imitate a drowned rat. Anything over 28℃ and I am dripping with sweat even completely naked. And no, I am not obese.

Maybe your dad is the same?

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