7 ms·

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

by pen2l 4y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOltGIaDPlY

hammock 4y ago
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
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
  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.
  - hammock 4y ago
    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...
  - hinkley 4y ago
    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).
- nicoburns 4y ago
  They might not have had an oven, but they certainly had a fire of some kind.
zer00eyz 4y ago
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!
- nateburke 4y ago
  Body insulation is way more efficient than the pink stuff you put in your attic! Cheaper, too!
scythe 4y ago
>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 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.
- hinkley 4y ago
  I reward myself for doing stuff outside in the cold with soup, hot beverages, occasionally baked goods.
tootie 4y ago
Yeah it's true. I was just joking that our air fryer doubles as a space heater.
SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
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.
- jghn 4y ago
  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.
cheschire 4y ago
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.
hinkley 4y ago
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.
- flyingfences 4y ago
  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.
binkHN 4y ago
> ...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.
- number6 4y ago
  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.
- gooseyman 4y ago
  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.
yamtaddle 4y ago
> 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.

by pen2l 4y ago

hammock 4y ago

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

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
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.
- hammock 4y ago
  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...
- hinkley 4y ago
  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).
nicoburns 4y ago
They might not have had an oven, but they certainly had a fire of some kind.

zer00eyz 4y ago

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!

nateburke 4y ago
Body insulation is way more efficient than the pink stuff you put in your attic! Cheaper, too!

scythe 4y ago

>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 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.

hinkley 4y ago
I reward myself for doing stuff outside in the cold with soup, hot beverages, occasionally baked goods.

tootie 4y ago

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

SketchySeaBeast 4y ago

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.

jghn 4y ago
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.

cheschire 4y ago

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.

hinkley 4y ago

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.

flyingfences 4y ago
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.

binkHN 4y ago

> ...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.

number6 4y ago
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.
gooseyman 4y ago
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.

yamtaddle 4y ago

> 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.