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Comment by fy20 | Hacker News Reader

I'd argue that houses in the UK are not very well designed to keep warm which is why they overheat in the summer. I live in the Baltics, in a modern 4 bedroom house, and our annual energy consumption for heating is around 6000kWh - that's around half the average of a similar sized house in the UK, even though our winters are much colder.

My house is a bit older so doesn't have it, but new houses must have a heat recovery ventilator. Almost all of these have a 'summer bypass mode' which bypasses the heat exchanger, so effectively draws warm air out of the house. This is useful in the summer, as here although it can get to 30c+ in the day, at night it almost always drops to below 20c. The way our houses are built we have a lot of thermal mass, so if you can cool it down during the night, it will make it a lot more comfortable during hot days.

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A lot of the UK houses are quite old and so they used the materials that were common at the time. My house is a mid-terrace house built around 1895 for mining workers, so it was built as cheaply as possible and doesn't seem to have a proper 90-degree angle anywhere.

It's going to become a much bigger problem in the UK as we're struggling with having enough housing anyway and making them energy efficient is going to take a lot of money and work.

I had heard that one reason UK housing was particularly bad insulation wise, and notoriously draughty was because they were all heated by open coal fires. The “bug” of being draughty became a “feature”. There is perhaps a lot to be understood about the British through it’s love of old buildings that are entirely unfit for modern purpose. The Houses of Commons/Palace of Westminster is a great example of this.

Whilst we do love our old buildings, I think it's important to remember that we do actually have old buildings. We visited Tombstone, Arizona on holiday and were surprised to see some historical building (can't remember which one) that was built in the early 1900s - that's younger than our house. The problem is that we've got loads of old houses and not much room left in populous areas (and most people don't want to live in the less populous areas such as Wales or up North) so people will live in old houses as it's cheaper than knocking them down and building anew.

>I think it's important to remember that we do actually have old buildings

The (US) city I live in has streets built in the mid-1600s.

Considering the great fire of London and the Blitz, is your canard really accurate?

Depends on the region, I suppose. The fire of London certainly didn't affect buildings outside of London and the Blitz didn't level everything.

> which is why they overheat in the summer

I own an old (1890's) terrace house in the UK. The only part that overheats is the modern loft-extension that I built 5 years ago. For the main part, it's like a cave; it retains heat in the winter, and remains cool in the summer.

It has single-leaf brick walls, which should be bad; but the frontage is quite narrow, which makes it pretty energy-efficient.

> I own an old (1890's) terrace house in the UK

Same. Our downstairs is nice and cool during the summer (not so much when it was getting near 40 degrees last year), but our upstairs gets much more light and can get too warm.

You are describing your house as Maxwell's demon, which is impossible.

I can see how it sounds like that (and I take it you're being humourous).

It's a mid-terrace house, which means that the side walls abut onto the neighbours' houses. The side walls are much bigger than the front and back. So not much of the external walls are exposed to the external environment, which is why it behaves like a cave.

To be clear, it's not like a heat-pump; it just maintains a reasonable temperature.

Did Maxwell's demon perhaps live in a cave?

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