Comment by pen2l | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pen2l | Hacker News Reader

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In addition to this, I think we should go back to doing things the hard way, the old-school way: adapt and adjust your lifestyle to temperature changes like our ancestors did. Let the temperature dictate your cooking: do the dishes that require oven use, that require you to have 3 stoves on at the same time (and crucially, avoid these dishes in the summer!).

Go on a bulk in the winter time so that you are more resilient to cold with that extra weight on you (and go on a cut in the summer). Set the temperature a little colder, put on a sweater, do more physical work. This is how the human body has evolved! - to be able to do withstand a little bit of cold, to sometimes be hungry for a long time. Always adjusting your environment for the absolute peak levels of comfort is probably not doing you any good and the heat pump's limitations are not that bad in this regard.

I think letting your life revolve around customs is fun as well as a biological necessity to some degree. If you skip the chance to test it out and let it face a challenge every now and then, you're not doing yourself favors. This elderly gentleman can make it fine alone in Yakutia where temperatures can reach as low as about -100 deg F, you probably can as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOltGIaDPlY

> Let the temperature dictate your cooking

Focusing on historically-seasonally-appropriate cooking also means you'll tend to get cheaper produce and it'll be higher-quality, since it'll be in-season at least somewhere in your hemisphere (even if you're not at the right latitude/growing-zone for whatever cuisine you're cribbing from). Traditional seasonal recipes won't include things that were hard or impossible to find in a given season, without modern farming, refrigeration, pasteurization, transportation, et c, in whatever region they recipes are native to, except maybe a few things that are especially canning- or pickling-friendly.

Squash dishes in the fall and early winter, a general great abundance of produce enabling colorful dishes with a large variety of veggie ingredients in the Summer, heavier on beans and meat and potatoes and starch and soups in the Winter (but still some salad greens! At least before the coldest few weeks of Winter, most places), green things galore in Spring.

The rhythm of it's nice. And it can make end-of-week use-up-the-leftover-ingredients dishes easier, since the space for those for a given area in a given season is usually well-explored and well-documented, so if you stick to one area and one season for inspiration for a week's menu, you can benefit from that.

There’s something brilliant about having a big pot of soup stock simmering down in the dead of winter. Not only are you heating the house, you’re also humidifying it with the steam from the pot.

The tricky one is canning. Harvest dates sometimes line up with heat waves and that’s either a sit outside with the windows open situation, or a suffer for your winter survival situation.

Some things you don't have to can right away. For example, we found that we can pick strawberries in-season, wash and top them, freeze them in gallon ziplocs, and then make jam later in the fall and it comes out the same as if you jam them same-day.

>Go on a bulk in the winter time so that you are more resilient to cold with that extra weight on you (and go on a cut in the summer).

Do not do this:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/obr.12251

Just wear some clothes. I wear fleece-lined hoodie and sweatpants in the winter. There's also that crazy guy who recommends long underwear, but as a skier (with plenty of experience wearing it), you'll never convince me to put that stuff on inside.

I reward myself for doing stuff outside in the cold with soup, hot beverages, occasionally baked goods.

Your ideas are good for today, however I question how accurate they are for "our ancestors." Most people in e.g. the colonial days didn't have an oven - they went to the town baker to use theirs when needed. They also didn't have three stoves and all the pots and utensils required to use them simultaneously

While three stoves was probably ahistorical for most homes, a fire which heats the home and is also used to cook (food in ceramic containers) was absolutely commonplace. In particular, a controlled cooking fire in the center of a single-room thatched-roof home was the template for much of Europe, Asia, and for some of the North American natives, albeit at different points in their history.

Of course.

Worth mentioning also (moving away from the poor now) wingback furniture, flannel pajamas with caps, canopy beds, bedwarmers with hot rocks or coals from the fire, three-piece wool suits during the day, etc...

Franklin stoves sold like hotcakes too, didn’t they? As an improvement over the hearth and the pot arm, which were themselves improvements over the three stone fire (which is still used by an alarming number of humans today).

They might not have had an oven, but they certainly had a fire of some kind.

Our bodies are able to compensate for extreme cold a lot better than extreme heat, so it's important to recognize that we are going to increasingly need effienct heat management systems that prioritize removing heat in an efficient and scalable way rather than focusing on adding heat. As you say, we can make up the difference ourselves usually by just adding insulating layers to retain core heat.

You are not wrong.

Blankets... sleep with a sheet in the summer, and the 14 layers in the winter. I know a few people who run the AC very low at night to keep cool with enough blankets to be comfortable in an igloo.

Every thing needs to change in the winter... Those PJ pants you plod around the house in, fleece in the winter ONLY. Seasonal clothing matters too!

Body insulation is way more efficient than the pink stuff you put in your attic! Cheaper, too!

While, sure, we can adjust ourselves, my concern is more for my house - if my heat pump can't keep things warm that means the cold bits in my house aren't getting the heat they need when they need it the most to keep my pipes from freezing. Yes, that should be solved with insulation too, but you don't really find out about those problems until after they happen.

Pure n=1 anecdata. Last winter I was on vacation and saw via Nest app that my boiler died. We have a heat pump that 99% of the time is used for AC, and sometimes for supplemental heat. We only have them in the main rooms, so things like bathrooms and such receive no benefit from them. The unit outside is a Mitsubishi Hyperheat. I logged in and turned the units on just to keep the house from freezing.

BUT during that trip a giant blizzard struck the area. I forget the air temps and they definitely weren't double digit negative but it was quite cold with high winds and a lot of snow to boot. They held the house together well enough in our absence.

> ...do the dishes that require oven use, that require you to have 3 stoves on at the same time...

This doesn't make a difference in my home in the winter. That said, I'm one of those types that has no issues putting on gloves and layers of clothing and driving around in my doorless and topless Jeep in the winter too.

Yeah this might work if you heat your oven with wood.

The outside of our oven gets merely warm. It's safe for our children to touch it.

For the stoves. The pots get hot, fast but the stove itself is more heated up by the pots than generate heat on it's own.

That heat has to go somewhere! But you are right that you may not feel the difference especially if your run the hood and it vents externally.

Your HVAC was designed for environmental comfort, the oven for cooking.

Yeah it's true. I was just joking that our air fryer doubles as a space heater.

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