I really enjoy the TV show Escape to the Chateau. A lot of couple buy an old run down French chateau and move in with their two kids. Each episode is roughly them doing up a part of it. Often with ideas for making money out of it.
Very much light entertainment, but it's eye opening how significant of a restoration and maintenance burden it is.
Thermal inertia can be a benefit: while it largely prevents you from benefiting from turning off the heat when you’re not home, it smooths out diurnal fluctuations and lets your control just the average temperature. So your windows can provide lots of solar gain, for example, without overheating you during the daytime.
The real problems are that stone is a terrible insulator, that single-pane windows are even worse, and that air leakage in old structures is incredibly wasteful.
A lot of large castle owners in France have setup a small apartment on the side for winter and use the main rooms only occasionally and during summer. This is not something new, in Versailles you can visit the king actual private bedroom that is much smaller and easy to heat than the official one.
Second point has no point, heat pumps are overhyped on expensive electricity, accumulator tanks still need be heated up by something. Lot's of energy must be spent. 3 point is silly, such "houses" have massive thermal inertia, it's gonna take a while to heat those rooms when you start using them and heat is gonna "bleed" internally anyway.
It will cost you a lot anyway, can't escape entropy.
Turns out Sam Altman accidentally bought a vacation home with broken heating in Alaska and his subsequent obsession with expensing the heating bill on the company CC is what brought us ChatGPT ;)
One very interesting idea I read about long ago was the use of low-power microwave emitters to make rooms feel much warmer - the author of the piece described the feeling as "like stepping into sunlight" when the emitters turned on.
Makes the 2.4 GHz spectrum pretty unusable, though.
Not the same effect exactly but I live in an 70s era apartment with heated ceilings in a couple rooms (which I didn’t even know was a thing).
It was a similar experience where initially it seemed great in the winter how quickly a room felt “warm”. But quickly you notice the air itself isn’t as warm which isn’t very pleasant and wait, I’m not feeling “warm” anymore I’m feeling “very hot”.
I basically gave up using them after the first winter except turned up sub-perceptually at like 25% just to add a bit of heat input to reduce the days where I need a space heater.
Interesting. The piece I read/heard didn't talk about using it instead of heating the house, but as a supplement to allow the whole-home temperature to be substantially lower.
Ah yeah that might work better. The one I read about was about having a giant magnetron in the basement, providing whole-house heating. Very 60's thing to try indeed.
The point is that if you are feeling actual thermal effects then you're probably in the danger zone of high power. They implied the effect was thermal "to make rooms feel much warmer", "like stepping into sunlight"; without clarification from them then my assumption is good that they were not talking about milliwatts.
