In Praise of the Hot-Water Bottle
Snuggly, cheap, and so efficient at warming that it’s a legit lower-carbon form of heating
Yesterday I caught the flu. I hadn’t gotten my flu shot. (Don’t be like me: Get your flu shot if you can, folks!)
Anyway, by the evening my fever spiked to 101.4 and I was a shivery, chilly, achy mess. I went to bed to get warm, but it wasn’t quite warm enough.
So I rummaged around in the bathroom cupboard and found …
… a hot-water bottle I’d bought six or seven years ago.
And wow, did it make me feel better! I climbed back into my bed, curled around the hot-water bottle like a cat, and my shivers evaporated.
It put me in mind of a wonderful piece I read earlier this year in Low Tech (the online magazine that runs on an entirely solar-powered server): “The Revenge of the Hot-Water Bottle”.
In the piece, Kris de Decker points out that hot-water bottles are wildly more efficient than most other ambient forms of heating. That’s because of this principle:
They heat people, not spaces.
Most often, we heat our houses and workspaces with ambient heating: Furnaces or heaters that warm the overall air in a building.
