Hacker News Reader

Comment by bregma | Hacker News Reader

Listen. I live in Canada, and butter is hard at room temperature from September through June because room temperature stays below 20. In fact, for at least a few days every year, even water gets hard in my kitchen. It is Cold here in winter.

Between hard butter and cold coffee/tea this is why every Canadian kitchen has a microwave. I have also come to think of the two summer months as 'soft butter season' because I can just spread it directly on my toast in the morning.

View on HN

Wow, I don't know anyone who actually has heating temp set below 20C. I have 21 myself at home and often get complaints it's too cold. (eastern europe)

To stay ontopic, I completely gave up spreading the butter as it's stored in the fridge year round. Just cutting thin slices and laying them on the bread is ok.

Y'all need to look into "butter keepers".

It's two bowls. Put the butter in one bowl. Put a 1/4" of water in the other. Flip the butter-bowl upside down into the water-bowl. Leave it on your table. Voila. spreadable butter.

If it's not spreadable (because you just got it out of the fridge or you keep your house chilly), because it's in a ceramic bowl you can just chop/squish/stir.

65F in our house here in Michigan (in the US). Thats ~18C. Our house was built in 1860 and leaks hot air like a sieve. We also get a noticeable breeze inside if the wind is from the west-southwest.

On the butter front, we get it delivered from a local dairy and for about half the year its too hard for easy spreading. We keep it on the counter and I basically put a patty of it on my toast and then stick it back in the toaster oven for another 30 seconds while I get my peanut butter out.

Its still found in travel guides for Eastern Europe: your hotel will be way too hot and there will be (probably) nothing you can do about it. That's nearly free Soviet gas for you ;)

Meanwhile, here in the Netherlands, the gov advertises that 18 degrees is enough (19 is considered standard).

Soviet gas? It comes from a time machine?

What's considered normal could have been dialed in during that time and still persist.

As sibling says, the best explanation I have found is that it's a holdover from Soviet natural gas politics (and in fact continued by Russian gas politics, as countries such as Ukraine can attest).

Now I don't know what the real issues were or are, but live in the old soviet block and the general understanding in my area is the heating systems were build badly, designed horribly. Of course the world at the time didn't know much about insulation either. So in order to satisfy the ones who had open walls aka no neighbours both sides, you had to push more hot water which made the ones living middle saunas. Also what floor you lived in, the pressure was never balanced. Radiators didn't usually have any control mechanism either and there was no real initiative to save. So people opened windows. I remember my father telling me that the windows were so poor quality where he used to live, it was smarter to isolate the radiators with tons of blankets instead. Wood with big cattle house was the main source of energy here. Now the systems are usually replaced and since energy costs so much more everywhere it's your wallet that dictates it not some bureaucrats.

65F (so about 18C) is my standard during the day when my heat in on in the northeast US. (Goes down to about 55 at night.)

As a child of an 18 home in Ontario Canada, now you know one. Sweaters and slippers.

> I have 21 myself at home and often get complaints it's too cold. (eastern europe)

This is because the air temperature is only one component that determines how warm one feels:

> The importance of the MRT can be illustrated by something we’ve all experienced. In an older home in the middle of winter, the ambient air temperature indoors can be 68 to 70 degrees [F], and yet we feel cold when we’re near a window. That’s because the cold interior pane of glass in that window is literally sucking warmth away from us, or, to put it more accurately, our bodies are emitting heat to that cold surface, which causes us to feel cold. This is the inverse of the experience of feeling warmed by the sun outdoors on a cold winter day. Our skin has high emissivity and absorptivity, meaning we’re very sensitive to radiant heat loss and gain.

* https://blipdesign.com/blog/passive-house-2/mean-radiant-tem...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_radiant_temperature

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_comfort

Vermont. 58F (≈ 14.4C). The only exception is that heat is never turned on before November 1st, so if it is a cold October then you better find your good flannel shirt.

I live in Ontario, Canada, and I'm about 30min outside of what most people would consider "civilization." As a result, and also a result in living in a heavy minnonite area, the only heating we have is propane, and that is super expensive. To heat my home at 16 degrees celsius , it costs about $400 for the month. It doesn't help that it's an old house that I'm slowly renovating to improve the insulation and structure, but for the time being, my wife and I keep it at 10, using a wood stove in the living room, and wear a sweater.

Around here (Eastern Europe too) people insulate their houses pretty well for a very long time. 2 weeks ago I had a power outage (heating was also off) for a day and the temperature inside was pretty good (~18C) when outside it was freezing.

We also used to use a lot of wood in stoves for heating and in most rural areas this is the main way to heat up at winter, can't you do the same? $400 for heating looks a bit too high, with a few thousand dollars you can insulate a small house if you do it yourself.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but my assumption is that the people making these complaints have central heating and aren’t just forgetting that it gets cold in Canada

As another canadian: we all have central heating or we'd die, what GP is saying is that confirmation bias may be in play here because it's the dead of winter and butter is going to be harder than the summer months anyway.

Right, yes, before central heating came along (in, what, the '60s?) everyone was dead.

They wore different clothes in winter back then.

I (not Canadian) buy a butter that has some rapeseed oil mixed in, which makes it smearable well below 20C.

Practical. I do some schmaltz cooking and will sometimes whip rendered tallow or chicken fat with butter. Because it's seasoned from the BBQ brisket or whatever dish it came from, the fat makes a great compound butter. It's also spreadable and great to spoon over vegetables, etc.

One of the people arguing that butter is hard is “Sylvain Charlebois, senior director at Dalhousie University's Agri-Food Analytics Lab”.

You should message them, tell them to turn their thermostat up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com