House Heating Haranguing

This past week I moved house from the place I'd been staying since I first arrived in Melbourne (which is why it's been a bit quiet around here). The place I moved to has no central heating, so I've been huddled in my room for the past few days (I'm also in the midst of a two-week vacation) with a single brave space heater which is doing its valiant best to warm it up to a livable temperature in here. (“Livable,” for me, a child of the tropics, being at bare minimum 20 °C [68 °F].) This has led to much rumination on my part about how houses in Melbourne seem to be undesigned to handle the normal temperature extremes in the region. It's like houses in Melbourne are built on the perpetually optimistic outlook that every day will be a balmy 20–24 °C (68–75.2 °F). Yet I've already endured weeks of temperatures being in the 5–15 °C (41–59 °F) range, with no end to winter in sight.

For starters, most houses are built out of brick, a novel building material for me as I don't recall ever living in a house so constructed (it's possible that I may have as a kid too young to remember). Having spent several months with it, my observation is that brick seems to retain heat about as well as a sieve does water. (I have a 1500 watt space heater, which can, over the course of hours, infinitesimally raise the temperature in my average-sized bedroom, which simple thermodynamics suggests means that the outgoing heat flux is of the same order of magnitude.) Insulation seems to be a foreign concept, and as mentioned whoever built the house I'm in saw no need for including any sort of central heating system, which just kind of blows my mind.

From talking with a few fellow Americans at CAS from Michigan and Wisconsin and a fellow student from the Netherlands, I gather that they too have noticed this, and that this issue of houses not seemingly being built for the weather is not really a problem at those locations. This has led me to formulate the following graph, based on my own experiences and hear-say from others:

I've personally had experience in the 0–15 °C range.

Basically, for places where it either gets really cold (like, freezing temperatures or below), or doesn't get very cold (like in Hilo, at the 15 °C end), houses are generally constructed in such a way that they can handle those temperatures pretty well. But if it gets cold, but not quite down to freezing, eh, people can just tough it out, amirite? It's not actually freezing yet, what are you complaining for? (Can you tell I get rather bitter and sarcastic when I'm cold?)

I've also (re)discovered that my motivation to get out of bed in the morning is directly and strongly correlated with the temperature outside the covers. I've only been able to directly test this over a moderately small temperature range so far (~11–22 °C), but extrapolating it out to “the house is on fire”-level temperatures I find that I would indeed be extremely motivated to get up, so it checks out.

Anyway, thank God for personal space heaters and all the quilts and blankets people have gifted me with over time (seriously, a blanket is probably one of the best gifts you could give me; I treasure them all). And winter should “only” last another two to three months. I really am quite happy with my new place otherwise—but oh, how I miss Hilo's climate during the winter! A hui hou!