The strange thing is I've never heard of the term 'house burping.' However 'airing out' has always been a part of my vocabulary. In fact I still practice it. Just open a window and let some air in even in winter. A general release for all this collected stale farts. Oh and I'm not that old. So the term may well have a wider usage than some people think. 😎
I’m a UK architect , and have always tried to install breathing wall when I can . Timber , no plastics , no barriers, cellulose insulation. Nobody really wants it and I have to ‘sell’ the concept to interested folks. Then they love it . Most prefer knob and slider style controls onto extremely maintenance hungry air handling, and don’t care about what their building is made from. They prefer control and teachno fixes not healthy houses with wetting and drying of walls part of the system.
Makes a lot of sense to me. I feel like a lot of this high tech / membranes + tapes / MVHR stuff is going to turn out to be fragile long term. At some point I want to write a piece on ‘Simple Building’ that addresses some of this. Thanks for the comment
I lived in a house in Australia that had been designed and built as his own home by a German civil engineer in 1952. It was solar passive. Eleven metres of directly north facing floor to ceiling windows controlled the house. (Southern hemisphere remember). There was a raked, overhanging flat roof. In summer, the roof shaded the windows because the sun was high in the sky, heat rises and open louvres let out the heat naturally, which could still be open in the rain. We rarely needed a fan.
In winter the lower sun came through the windows, heating the timber, stone and brick construction which radiated the heat back into the room. There was a fireplace for really cold days that was only used if it rained a lot and the house got cold.
I loved living there but people thought it "looked weird".
Meanwhile I lived in a house in New Zealand that had been built by an Australian. Overhanging eaves to keep the sun out, house surrounded by eucalyptus trees and a log burner right down one end of the long house. It kept cool in summer, was impossible to heat in the winter, and the gum leaves blocked the guttering and caused floods.
Wonderful write up. In a funny inversion, Pevsner's opening lecture on 'The Englishness of English Art' speaks on exactly this, in the 1955 lecture he notes how a draughty house is somewhat intrinsically linked to the English charachter, but not eternally so, citing Erasmus, writing from Cambridge in 1517, ‘The rooms are generally so constructed that no draught can be sent through them'.
Have a listen to the lecture recordings on BBC Sounds, they are wonderful, and this discourse on draughts happens within the first 5 or 10 minutes of the first lecture
I came to the UK from Australia over 20 years ago. I could never understand the British obsession with closed windows, closed off fireplaces and living with mould. Your article explains it! I always sleep with an open window. I regularly air the house much to my English husband's annoyance. You haven't explicitly mentioned it but one thing that aways struck me is that radiators are almost always placed under windows. And that has always been given as the reason why you couldn't open the windows! So don't put radiators under windows!
As I understand it, from an engineer, the placement of radiators under windows helps heat circulation: coldest air by windows, sinks, radiator warms it, warm air rises, and so forth. Purely anecdotally, I had my bedroom in a London house with loose sash windows and a radiator under the window. I easily kept the room warm. I then moved bedrooms (orientation the same, so same morning sun) but the radiator was on the other side of the room, away from the window, and the room was never warm in the same way.
It is advisable to fit the radiators under windows, as it's unlikely that anyone would place furniture in front of the windows. Allowing access for cleaning etc.
Ironically Victorians placed those radiators under window so as to heat the new air coming in with radiators. Using the radiators with the windows no ajar a little completely defeats the design. We got closed houses in our minds in the 60s with newer gas central heating, despite the fact that makes a wet heat and you need the windows open more. Sigh.
This was lovely, it made me smile so much amd Iove the detail! The sashes, of course, don't ever fit quite right! But airing the house is absolutely a hill I will die on, and I grew up in a house where the doors and windows were flung open all the time. We wore thick jumpers in the 80s and felt cold. It was OK.
Your comments and quotes about the place a fire holds in the English home really resonated. The old English Hall house model (that you can see in action complete with fire burning in the middle of the room) at the wonderful Weald and Downland Museum in West Sussex absolutely exemplifies this obsession. The house is quite literally built around the fire, and generations of memory (of being slowly smoked to death) dies hard. Same reason we love a BBQ??
The Japanese have a similar problem. Low to no insulation, and heat the room that you are in versus the whole house. Economically it makes sense. However, where the Japanese and English depart is that they continually improve their systems, whereas the English refuse to change. One possible solution would be as you said, to start the fireplaces, unblock the chimneys, throw open the windows, and, dare I say, spend more time at your pub talking to your neighbours, enjoying communal heat and of course your delicious pints of ale with a warming side of scotch egg.
I experienced it a bit like that as well as an au pair in the UK in the late eighthies. It seemed a bit of a status symbol with the upper middle class, not to spoil the children with overheated rooms (or clothes) (my poor mother, when visiting, was nearly calling child services when she saw the frozen blue knees in shorts).
Owners of UK country houses didn't have indoor plumbing and toilets in many cases until their families married US heiresses. Because they demanded hygiene. Kensington Palace didn't have flushing toilets until 1880. Ironically my ancestor Matthew Allen built a lot of working class housing he designed and built for the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company and since 1862-1880 all of his appartments had running water and in flat toilets. No shared facilities (which was common if there were even any at all) they also had limewashed dust chutes for sending refuse down, and an ash chute on the front balcony for the same. He built 3,500 apartments in total across London. Most are still standing and grade listed.
The only few country houses that did have indoor plumbing were new houses at the time like Cragside and Knebworth. Ironically Cragside was designed by Norman Shaw architect but built by my ancestor's best friend and eulogist William Henry Lascelles.
Not parrafin, kerosine. Still quite a lot of use in the countryside in winter. Not so much condensation as Japanese winters are so dry, but every so often you have to open the window to get rid of the kerosine fumes! Rather inefficient. Luckily I live in Tokyo where that is not the case (gas & electricity heating).
I had a black mould issue in my bedroom when I first bought my flat. The previous owner had tried to treat the pooling damp as water ingress rather than condensation. Fortunately my father was a construction engineer of many years' experience and he understood the cause correctly. He fitted me an electric radiator in the correct spot (precise location is important) and the problem cleared itself as the wall warmed up. An extractor fan in the kitchen also helped.
Open ventilation grilles help prevent mould caused by condensation, as does moderate heating (instead of cranking up the temperature to tropical heights as I ofter encounter in Britain).
Not in care homes where it's literally 35°C as I know folk that work in those temperatures and it's ungodly labouring and getting hot in that. Also going in and out of that heat all day makes staff sick a lot.
This makes so much sense! When I was a teenager, we moved from a new build with double glazing to a house built around 1910 with high ceilings, blocked-up fireplaces, but original wooden sash windows. I'd get woken up if it was windy because they banged about, but no mould! It was a bit chilly, though.
I now live in a terrace built in the 1880s with UPVC windows (with no trickle vents - argh) and blocked-up fireplaces. The walls are thin, so it gets cold (so we put Wallrock Thermal Liner on some of the walls, which has definitely helped). I've got into the habit of opening the windows during the day and have done so even when it's been snowing. In the winter, I wear thermals, so I'm not particularly cold, and only have the heating on early morning and evening. I've recently watched a TV series set in Finland and wondered how they kept their house so warm when there were banks of snow outside!
Love it. Thus how I grew up in the North West of England in the 1950s and 1960s. The family clustered around the fire place in the living room. The small drawing room although furnished was never used. During the day and evening the upstairs windows were partially opened along with the kitchen window. At night there was no heating in either of the two bedrooms unless you counted the hot water bottles used in winter.
We grew up in Germany with tile ovens, which take a couple of hours to heat a room but then keep heating it for about 10h. So you heated them with anthracite coal bricks in the morning and kept the doors of the heated rooms shut, mainly the living room and the children's room. Bedroom windows open at night and living room aired briefly before heating in the morning. Now our old apartment has central heating but that's still how my mother heats, and she gets back money every year from the heating costs they collect every month, like income tax in the US.
I tried incorporating the practice of Lüften this year and opened all the windows every morning - I'd have quite liked it but the weather circumstances have been a perfect storm which led mosquitos to be hatched early and they got in through my open windows and set up camp in various plantpots. I've been bitten to pieces since February. Well, it was a nice idea!
All the maintenance I do ... because folk don't.. get it! And they want a new colour on the wall... but the wall is a damp rag! But we have conversions of medieval barns into techbro open plans. Middle class work from homes in georgian outhouses and definately no draughts please.. drying clothes, boiling kettles, yacking into phones with the heating on full.
Really interesting. We had terrible mould but installed proper extractor fans in the kitchen and bathroom and now it's just okay. The fans are very loud and the neighbours complain. It's a first floor flat. Although the housing stock isn't perfect, dividing things into flats makes things much worse - there are certain changes we can't make because we don't own the building and the managing agent is spread too thinly accross their portfolio and can't be bothered. Anyway TMI
The strange thing is I've never heard of the term 'house burping.' However 'airing out' has always been a part of my vocabulary. In fact I still practice it. Just open a window and let some air in even in winter. A general release for all this collected stale farts. Oh and I'm not that old. So the term may well have a wider usage than some people think. 😎
I’ve never heard of either. ‘Airing’, maybe, but only in the context of laundry. Of maybe a house that’s been shut up for a long time…
I’m a UK architect , and have always tried to install breathing wall when I can . Timber , no plastics , no barriers, cellulose insulation. Nobody really wants it and I have to ‘sell’ the concept to interested folks. Then they love it . Most prefer knob and slider style controls onto extremely maintenance hungry air handling, and don’t care about what their building is made from. They prefer control and teachno fixes not healthy houses with wetting and drying of walls part of the system.
Makes a lot of sense to me. I feel like a lot of this high tech / membranes + tapes / MVHR stuff is going to turn out to be fragile long term. At some point I want to write a piece on ‘Simple Building’ that addresses some of this. Thanks for the comment
I lived in a house in Australia that had been designed and built as his own home by a German civil engineer in 1952. It was solar passive. Eleven metres of directly north facing floor to ceiling windows controlled the house. (Southern hemisphere remember). There was a raked, overhanging flat roof. In summer, the roof shaded the windows because the sun was high in the sky, heat rises and open louvres let out the heat naturally, which could still be open in the rain. We rarely needed a fan.
In winter the lower sun came through the windows, heating the timber, stone and brick construction which radiated the heat back into the room. There was a fireplace for really cold days that was only used if it rained a lot and the house got cold.
I loved living there but people thought it "looked weird".
Sounds like the shape of the “Earth ships” in New Mexico
Meanwhile I lived in a house in New Zealand that had been built by an Australian. Overhanging eaves to keep the sun out, house surrounded by eucalyptus trees and a log burner right down one end of the long house. It kept cool in summer, was impossible to heat in the winter, and the gum leaves blocked the guttering and caused floods.
It's about proper design. Not your hate for where I was born.
I've always had my bedroom window open summer or winter, ditto for other rooms.
Wonderful write up. In a funny inversion, Pevsner's opening lecture on 'The Englishness of English Art' speaks on exactly this, in the 1955 lecture he notes how a draughty house is somewhat intrinsically linked to the English charachter, but not eternally so, citing Erasmus, writing from Cambridge in 1517, ‘The rooms are generally so constructed that no draught can be sent through them'.
Thanks Jack. I should definitely read that. The idea of the room 'designed around draughts' is such a funny idea.
Have a listen to the lecture recordings on BBC Sounds, they are wonderful, and this discourse on draughts happens within the first 5 or 10 minutes of the first lecture
I came to the UK from Australia over 20 years ago. I could never understand the British obsession with closed windows, closed off fireplaces and living with mould. Your article explains it! I always sleep with an open window. I regularly air the house much to my English husband's annoyance. You haven't explicitly mentioned it but one thing that aways struck me is that radiators are almost always placed under windows. And that has always been given as the reason why you couldn't open the windows! So don't put radiators under windows!
As I understand it, from an engineer, the placement of radiators under windows helps heat circulation: coldest air by windows, sinks, radiator warms it, warm air rises, and so forth. Purely anecdotally, I had my bedroom in a London house with loose sash windows and a radiator under the window. I easily kept the room warm. I then moved bedrooms (orientation the same, so same morning sun) but the radiator was on the other side of the room, away from the window, and the room was never warm in the same way.
It is advisable to fit the radiators under windows, as it's unlikely that anyone would place furniture in front of the windows. Allowing access for cleaning etc.
It's about thermal barriers, surely? Meaning you can't let in fresh air...
Ironically Victorians placed those radiators under window so as to heat the new air coming in with radiators. Using the radiators with the windows no ajar a little completely defeats the design. We got closed houses in our minds in the 60s with newer gas central heating, despite the fact that makes a wet heat and you need the windows open more. Sigh.
Indeed...
A radiator under a single-glazed window prevents/reduces condensation.
This was lovely, it made me smile so much amd Iove the detail! The sashes, of course, don't ever fit quite right! But airing the house is absolutely a hill I will die on, and I grew up in a house where the doors and windows were flung open all the time. We wore thick jumpers in the 80s and felt cold. It was OK.
Your comments and quotes about the place a fire holds in the English home really resonated. The old English Hall house model (that you can see in action complete with fire burning in the middle of the room) at the wonderful Weald and Downland Museum in West Sussex absolutely exemplifies this obsession. The house is quite literally built around the fire, and generations of memory (of being slowly smoked to death) dies hard. Same reason we love a BBQ??
Another advantage of always having a downstairs window open is that no need for a cat flap.
The Japanese have a similar problem. Low to no insulation, and heat the room that you are in versus the whole house. Economically it makes sense. However, where the Japanese and English depart is that they continually improve their systems, whereas the English refuse to change. One possible solution would be as you said, to start the fireplaces, unblock the chimneys, throw open the windows, and, dare I say, spend more time at your pub talking to your neighbours, enjoying communal heat and of course your delicious pints of ale with a warming side of scotch egg.
I don't know why you would say the English refuse to change.
I experienced it a bit like that as well as an au pair in the UK in the late eighthies. It seemed a bit of a status symbol with the upper middle class, not to spoil the children with overheated rooms (or clothes) (my poor mother, when visiting, was nearly calling child services when she saw the frozen blue knees in shorts).
Owners of UK country houses didn't have indoor plumbing and toilets in many cases until their families married US heiresses. Because they demanded hygiene. Kensington Palace didn't have flushing toilets until 1880. Ironically my ancestor Matthew Allen built a lot of working class housing he designed and built for the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company and since 1862-1880 all of his appartments had running water and in flat toilets. No shared facilities (which was common if there were even any at all) they also had limewashed dust chutes for sending refuse down, and an ash chute on the front balcony for the same. He built 3,500 apartments in total across London. Most are still standing and grade listed.
The only few country houses that did have indoor plumbing were new houses at the time like Cragside and Knebworth. Ironically Cragside was designed by Norman Shaw architect but built by my ancestor's best friend and eulogist William Henry Lascelles.
Just an observation.
I believe the Japanese also use parrafin heaters a lot. The condensation must be unreal
Not parrafin, kerosine. Still quite a lot of use in the countryside in winter. Not so much condensation as Japanese winters are so dry, but every so often you have to open the window to get rid of the kerosine fumes! Rather inefficient. Luckily I live in Tokyo where that is not the case (gas & electricity heating).
I had a black mould issue in my bedroom when I first bought my flat. The previous owner had tried to treat the pooling damp as water ingress rather than condensation. Fortunately my father was a construction engineer of many years' experience and he understood the cause correctly. He fitted me an electric radiator in the correct spot (precise location is important) and the problem cleared itself as the wall warmed up. An extractor fan in the kitchen also helped.
Open ventilation grilles help prevent mould caused by condensation, as does moderate heating (instead of cranking up the temperature to tropical heights as I ofter encounter in Britain).
I'm British and have never encountered ‘tropical’ temperature housing. Our energy costs are way too high for that.
Tell that to shop and hotel owners, you'll do me a favour!
Not in care homes where it's literally 35°C as I know folk that work in those temperatures and it's ungodly labouring and getting hot in that. Also going in and out of that heat all day makes staff sick a lot.
This makes so much sense! When I was a teenager, we moved from a new build with double glazing to a house built around 1910 with high ceilings, blocked-up fireplaces, but original wooden sash windows. I'd get woken up if it was windy because they banged about, but no mould! It was a bit chilly, though.
I now live in a terrace built in the 1880s with UPVC windows (with no trickle vents - argh) and blocked-up fireplaces. The walls are thin, so it gets cold (so we put Wallrock Thermal Liner on some of the walls, which has definitely helped). I've got into the habit of opening the windows during the day and have done so even when it's been snowing. In the winter, I wear thermals, so I'm not particularly cold, and only have the heating on early morning and evening. I've recently watched a TV series set in Finland and wondered how they kept their house so warm when there were banks of snow outside!
Love it. Thus how I grew up in the North West of England in the 1950s and 1960s. The family clustered around the fire place in the living room. The small drawing room although furnished was never used. During the day and evening the upstairs windows were partially opened along with the kitchen window. At night there was no heating in either of the two bedrooms unless you counted the hot water bottles used in winter.
We grew up in Germany with tile ovens, which take a couple of hours to heat a room but then keep heating it for about 10h. So you heated them with anthracite coal bricks in the morning and kept the doors of the heated rooms shut, mainly the living room and the children's room. Bedroom windows open at night and living room aired briefly before heating in the morning. Now our old apartment has central heating but that's still how my mother heats, and she gets back money every year from the heating costs they collect every month, like income tax in the US.
NEVER burn chipboard or particle board, the glues and chemicals used in the construction give off highly toxic gas.
Also don't burn books, that's a whole different kettle of fish.
And don't put fish in your kettle, it would spoil the flavour of your tea.
I tried incorporating the practice of Lüften this year and opened all the windows every morning - I'd have quite liked it but the weather circumstances have been a perfect storm which led mosquitos to be hatched early and they got in through my open windows and set up camp in various plantpots. I've been bitten to pieces since February. Well, it was a nice idea!
All the maintenance I do ... because folk don't.. get it! And they want a new colour on the wall... but the wall is a damp rag! But we have conversions of medieval barns into techbro open plans. Middle class work from homes in georgian outhouses and definately no draughts please.. drying clothes, boiling kettles, yacking into phones with the heating on full.
No chance.
Really interesting. We had terrible mould but installed proper extractor fans in the kitchen and bathroom and now it's just okay. The fans are very loud and the neighbours complain. It's a first floor flat. Although the housing stock isn't perfect, dividing things into flats makes things much worse - there are certain changes we can't make because we don't own the building and the managing agent is spread too thinly accross their portfolio and can't be bothered. Anyway TMI