this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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It's the humidity that makes it so unbearable
...and then combined with our entire architecture, diet, clothing and lifestyles being based around centuries of keeping out the cold, wind and damp.
If your house keeps out the cold, wind and damp, it will keep out the heat. There is no special way for walls, windows and insulation to let heat or hot air pass only in one direction.
The issue is thermal mass. Buildings are designed to absorb heat in the winter. Obviously when you aren't using heat they'll absorb whatever the temperature is.
First 2 days of a heatwave the building holds a cooler temperature. After that the walls begin to heat and it is simply too hot at night to dissipate all the heat the building has absorbed
Since I've explained this about twenty times today already, why don't you tell me what you think the temperature is like in a building with lower thermal mass?
Sure I can do that, I grew up in a trailer and we had the AC go out one summer in the southern USA.
Mid day was hot as fuck. Once the sun went down and we opened the windows it cooled off very quickly to the outside temperature and it was easy to sleep.
I would usually shut my windows around 12 to 1 am. Then I could sleep comfortably until about 10 or 11.
Here when I shut my windows to sleep I'm hot again by about 7am and feel the walls radiating heat.
So overall the peak of the day is better, but nighttime is significantly worse. Honestly I'd rather be a few degrees warmer during the day and sleep well than being consistently hot all the time
Well if we're reducing it to anecdotes, here in my house with thick brick walls, we open the windows as soon as the outside temperature drops below inside, use fans to exhaust heat, and end up with a bedroom in which it is comfortable to sleep. So I guess we're at an impasse, unless we're able to work out some general principle that doesn't rely on personal experience.
I don't think either of us have our building schematics on hand to run the math on this. If your room is cooling that effectively I suspect you have very favorable window placement and significantly less thick walls. Or perhaps just a smaller building. I'm in large apartment complex so I'm just surrounded by progressively warming concrete
I think in your apartment complex you're probably affected by a bunch of other people who are keeping their curtains open in the day and not ventilating in the evening, so you'll be screwed whatever. Your trailer will have been roasting in the day, but will also have been small and so easy to fully ventilate.
I think your suspicion misses other important variables: for example, I might just live somewhere cooler than what you're thinking about. That's why I don't think this personal experience swapping is very productive.
In contrast, the science is pretty simple: all other things being equal, a building with high thermal mass will maintain the same average temperature as one with low thermal mass. You may well be more comfortable during the worst nights, but you'll be less comfortable during the worst days. But special attention to cooling sleeping areas that can be performed in any house can mitigate that, but can't mitigate peak temperatures.
This statement. Makes me unsure you know what thermal mass is. If all things are the same they will have the same thermal mass.
If you left a 10kg block of steel on the pavement and a 5kg block of steel on the pavement all day which would become cooler to the touch faster once the sun has set? Obviously the 5kg block of steel.
I said ”all other things being equal"
Okay so you've invented materials that can be exactly the same and have different thermal properties through sheer will alone. Honestly good for you, get that to market and you will be very wealthy
Everything is insulated and sealed shut. There are heaters inside the house. The sun comes through the window and heats the room up. The heat cannot escape.
Then nor can its occupants.
Or, perhaps... perhaps the occupants can open the windows when the inside temperature exceeds the outside temperature. They could use a fan to vent the hot air faster. They could even place some kind of opaque covering in front of - or even behind - the windows to prevent hot air from getting into the room itself.
I'm only being sarcastic because this is the tenth reply on the subject I've made today.
Well, you're kind of being a bit of a bell-end about it, but some of your suggestions are correct, in terms of that's what the buildings lack in their architecture.
You know greenhouses, like you grow tomatoes in etc? They gather all the sun's heat and trap it inside, so it's hot and humid - but even in cold weather, they stay warm enough so seeds can germinate and plants don't die? That's what our houses are like.
Office buildings are especially bad for it. Big fancy glass thing. Triple glazed. No openable windows. No shutters. No curtains.
Houses likewise, you can open all the windows in the house, but there's high humidity and no air movement, so it just sits. A fan can help a little in a localised space.
Even shutting the curtains during strong sun doesn't do much - external shutters would help - so the heat is stopped before it's trapped behind the glass - but it, or air conditioning things are a lot to go through for 3 weeks of too-hot weather, compared to 8 weeks of temperate weather and 41 weeks of too cold weather.
Internal shutters and curtains absolutely do a lot. The difference is most noticeable here in the kitchen, simply because I am more likely to forget to close the blinds there, but it is several degrees cooler after a day of sun intercepted by the blinds versus sun pouring directly into the room. The difference comes from the fact that visible light is reflected straight back out of the window (rather than bouncing around inside the room, heating up each surface it hits), and that a layer of hot air develops behind the blind - this hot air passes its heat slowly into the room, yes - but it also conducts into the outside. Because the air directly next to the window is significantly hotter than it would be with no barrier, it conducts outside much faster than it would be (because rate of heat transfer increases with the difference in heat). Meanwhile the heat transfer into the room is slower (because it's instantaneous if you allow the sun in).
I hope we start putting external shutters on buildings faster. Everyone getting A/C is unsustainable, and as you say, it's a lot for just a few weeks each year.
Absolutely - I'd love it if some of the energy efficiency grants would also go towards shutters (which can work for cold in the winter too). Not so useful for rooms you're actually in, but great for keeping a room at home dark and cool whilst you're at work.
Blinds are probably a lot better than curtains at this time of year as well. Most people (myself included) tend to leave rooms with "whatever they already had in them", but it wouldn't be a great hardship to swap curtains out for blinds for some of the year.
I disagree. Turning the lights on during the day for a few weeks every year isn't a big problem! And I'd certainly rather do that than run A/C.
(As an aside, my desk is right in front of a window so I actually have to draw the curtains and have a light on a lot of the time anyway to be able to see my screen)
Hot air, no, but heat from sun, very much yes. That's a one-way kind of transaction
Quite easy to mostly block with curtains. Our houses could definitely do with external shutters though, which would be more effective. I would say this architectural difference doesn't fall under "our homes are designed to keep heat in" though.
Once the sunlight has passed through the window, the battle against the heat is mostly lost. Awnings, external shutters and to some extent solar protection film are some of the better options in this instance.
These are things we've had the luxury of not having to care about in the past, instead being able to harvest some solar heat during the seasons where heat is scarce. Less so these days.
In any case, I think "our homes are not designed to keep heat out" would be an accurate statement for northern Europe.
We have the oldest housing stock in europe and some of the most leaky. In the winter the heat bleeds out and in the summer the cold does too.
Yes, that is true, but that is not the popular myth that the person I replied to was expressing: that "because our houses are designed to be warm, they overheat in summer." This is not true. The thing you're saying, "because our houses are actually quite shit at being warm, they overheat in summer" is true but different.
The bricks and wall thickness are designed to absorb heat and release them in the evening though. Not sure if it can work the other way around.
Really they're designed to prevent the passage of heat from inside to outside, so that your heating (or in the past, your fire) didn't pointlessly heat the outdoors. But this design can't work only in one direction, so it also slows the passage of heat from outside to inside.
There are three main ways this slowing happens:
Each of these properties is symmetric, because physics doesn't "know" which side of the wall is inside and which is outside - it only "knows" which is hotter and which is cooler. So the exact properties which keep you toasty in winter help keep you cool in summer.
You speak with a lot of confidence for one who is not well travelled.
We use the Dehumidify option on our units, it uses less energy (also less €) and makes the place fresh as can be.
Source: in Spain with my nuts stuck to my leg from May-October
*laughs in Florida*
I lived in Florida and now I'm in Europe and honestly give me Florida.
The outside is bearable to me, but cooler than Florida is this time of year. The issue is there's no escape. AC is incredibly rare and even the few stores that do have it don't crank it like Florida.
I wake up its hot, I go out its hot, and I go to bed its hot.
Back in Florida it was hot while I waited for the car AC to kick on, the office was cool, and my house was cool.
Having no break from the heat is brutal
Florida is unbearable even for the people who live there.
Florida is unbearable because of the people who live there.
Tell me about it. I got out as soon as I could.
That's because its housing and other infrastructure was built by colonists who care more about conformity to the colonial culture than actual habitability.
Natural cooling? Withstanding floods? Fuck that noise, let's build flat-roofed structures directly onto the soil surrounded by open grass out of materials that are both expensive to replace and too weak to survive high wind speeds. Oh no why is it so hot all the time and why does every hurricane/storm surge cause so much property damage? Better keep rebuilding the same way.
But they do rebuild to better resist hurricanes? Florida doesn't do much good for its people, but it does build for storms.
I remember when Hurricane Sandy eviscerated the northeast. I was living in Florida at the time and people were shocked that a cat 1 hurricane could cause so much damage. Part of the answer was building codes. Modern buildings in Florida are built to tolerate much worse winds, but New York and New Jersey, where strong hurricanes aren't as common, still had many homes built without such thought in mind.
That's why a cat 1 in Florida is a normal day, where if people are hunkered down, they just party straight through it without fear, even though the same storm can devastate other states. Building codes make it possible.
The new problem Florida has yet to solve is flooding. Although the storm drains are supposed to handle a significant volume, stronger storms + rising sea levels are overwhelming the infrastructure. It also doesn't help that towns are built at sea level in former swampland.
I’d set my self on fire before stepping foot in Florida
That's a great strategy to keep the wildlife off of you.