How could ancient people manage to live with extreme cold in Europe with no heating services available today?

Stephen Morgan

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Moved around a bit as I was curious about the World Updated 3y

How could ancient people manage to live with extreme cold in Europe with no heating services available today?

Not sure if this counts as ancient but my house in Northern Poland is 600 years old and has an ingenious passive air con and heating system.

The Summer weather is very often 30C plus and in the Winter -30C so there are two extremes to cope with and remember when it was built there was no electricity and no fans so everything needs to rely on convection and passive air flow.

The interior remains at 18C in the Summer and with a few buckets of coal or some wood stays at 20C during the Winter.

The system works because there is a massive heat sink under the house made from the remains of a 12C castle. So there is around 170 sq.m. of deep cellars. Plus the house is oriented due South at the front with a steep pitched roof and very thick walls around one metre thick with deeply recessed windows.

There are two central features that make it all work:

A very wide stair well leading down to the cellars, and a huge chimney breast next to it with five flues to which I can attach wood burning stoves or other heaters.

The system works like this:

In the Summer the cellars are around 8C and the cold air is drawn up from the cellars if I open some vent windows in the roof in the early morning and then close them at around 10–00 a.m. The sun is high in the sky so the solar gain is very low due to the pitch of the roof and sun does not come in through the windows.

Wintertime if I light a fire in one of the rooms the chimney breast quickly becomes hot and radiates warmth to the entire house due to the convoluted flues in the chimney stack. Further warm air is sucked up from the cellars as these warm up to around 12C in late Autumn plus the sun is low down and I get solar gain through the windows.

All in it works pretty well although we do have a conventional boiler and hot water radiator system now which is mainly used for the hot water for the bathrooms.

The ghosts -- of which there are three — also seem happy with the arrangement and they like it when I brew my beer during the Summer and they like a drink or two.

Not everything old is useless but sadly young folks think they know it all and Siri or Alexa are the go-to places for wisdom and information.

Folks back in the day were not all dumb f**** as they had to survive and make do with what they had.