The Day Before Tomorrow
Posted on Tuesday 5th May 2009
Summer is decidedly over and a cold snap has taken us by surprise. It has also highlighted a major difference in the emphasis of construction of homes here versus Northern Europe. A couple of my colleagues from Scandinavia and I were discussing this today. Here it seems that buildings are set up primarily for the hot weather with thin walls, little by way of insulation and single-pane glazing. The benefits for summer back-fire in winter as it is nigh on impossible to maintain warmth. Compare that to our house in Leicester with it’s double glazing, double brick skin, cavity wall insulation and double lagged loft space. As a result we only used to run the heating for an hour morning and evening, yet the house remained warm. Here it doesn’t seem to matter how long we run the heating as it bleeds away as soon as the heater is switched off.
So how to tackle this problem? One option would be to run the heaters night and day while we are in the house. Effective but very expensive. The more viable option is to insulate ourselves instead since we can’t alter the structure of the house. During the day and evenings it means wrapping ourselves up in fleeces and thermals. At night our new weapon is a king-size goose down duvet which should keep us nice and toasty from now on and, being larger than our bed, should provide ample additional allowance for moggies who keep stealing real estate.
Eventually, when we can finally afford to have a house built, efficient thermal regulation will be a major consideration in construction, and then we will be prepared for global warming or the next ice age.
