As looking out the window doesn’t appear to be as reliable an indicator of the temperature here in Oslo as it is in the UK (probably just because there is a greater range and variation from day to day) I bought one of those all-singing all-dancing electronic weather stations last week. (OK – it wasn’t the super-duper model with rain gauge and anemometer but you have to draw the line somewhere.) I no longer need to experience that “oops I should have put more clothes on” feeling when I step out of the door.
By way of experiment, whilst Christine and Emma were away I turned off the heating in the apartment. Despite the overnight temperature dropping to below freezing outside, the temperature inside didn’t dip below 20 degrees and spends much of its time hovering around 25 degrees. As we are on the first floor (that’s a UK first floor and everybody else’s second floor) of a three storey building we only have two external surfaces so presumably all of this heat is coming from our neighbours. Well, not my fault if their apartments aren’t well insulated is it? Only, if I remember my thermodynamics correctly, if we heated our apartment to the same temperature as theirs, then they wouldn’t be losing that heat (at least in our direction). Does that make me a heat thief if I leave our radiators turned off?! What if everyone in the building took the same approach? Where would we be then?!
Tags: heat, oslo, temperature, thermodynamics, weather
It seems I may not be such a thief after all… there appears to be a hot water tank in one of the kitchen cupboards which is giving off quite a lot of heat!