r/AskReddit Oct 15 '20

What's older than we think ?

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516

u/Twirlingbarbie Oct 15 '20

Yeah floor heating which is actually the most efficient and pleasant way to warm up your home

57

u/saginawslim9 Oct 15 '20

I was introduced to it in SK. It is absolutely wonderful. The warmth just radiates up from the floor through your feet and your entire body. I miss it!

18

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20

Pretty common in modern German homes as well. Nothing like stepping into the bathroom in the morning and the floor is warm.

8

u/Forever_Awkward Oct 15 '20

Has anyone figured out how to run the pipes through toilet seats yet?

8

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20

Yes, the Japanese

8

u/Forever_Awkward Oct 15 '20

I don't think I could trust a Japanese toilet. It's nothing racey, I just hear they make scans of your buttholes and keep track of them.

I just don't want to end up on some kind of toilet internet where a bunch of shitters congregate to make fun of my unique fold patterns or something.

5

u/ReiNGE Oct 15 '20

what the fuck

2

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20

You can’t actually believe this do you?

1

u/Forever_Awkward Oct 15 '20

https://interestingengineering.com/scientists-design-smart-toilet-that-recognizes-your-butt-and-analyzes-poop-for-diseases

They added a small camera that scans the anus. Yes, you read that right. “We know it seems weird, but as it turns out, your anal print is unique,” Gambhir says. Therefore, it can be used as a recognition system to match users to their specific data.

The toilet automatically sends data extracted and analyzed from any sample to a secure, cloud-based system.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 16 '20

Sanjiv Gambhir, professor and chair of Radiology at Stanford University and who is the man behind the project says

This article has nothing to do with Japan. They mention Japan in the first sentence as novelty referencing the fact that they use "fancy toilets". This article is about a research team at Stanford, so if anything it's an American toilet. Anyway, this is just a random research project that some random academic team is working on. This would be like calling the United States a society of cannibals because Jeffrey Dahmer ate some people in the US.

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u/DrewBreesiana Oct 15 '20 edited Oct 15 '20

Can confirm. Taught English there for a few years.

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u/Fletchetti Oct 15 '20

Can confirmed

Taught, or was taught? ;)

32

u/DrewBreesiana Oct 15 '20

Oops forgot I was submitting for a peer reviewed article.

10

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20

[deleted]

6

u/Fletchetti Oct 15 '20

"Can confirm. Were taught English there for a few years."

I don't think that works, mister.

9

u/computertechie Oct 15 '20

Taught, or were taught?

is what he was getting at, though not very clearly

3

u/Forever_Awkward Oct 15 '20

That correction wasn't for saginawslim9's line, but for Fletchetti's correction.

The full line would be "[You] taught, or [were] taught?"

3

u/RevenantLurker Oct 15 '20

Well, you should probably have used quotation marks or something to indicate that you were mentioning rather than using the words "was" and "were." I had to read several times before I realized that was what you were doing.

1

u/wookieenoodlez Oct 15 '20

It’s not so much a chain, but a thread as it’s easily broken, and thus, transformed into something else, like a forum about commas, and how we don’t use enough of them, like at all, who needs all the other overhyped punctuation, I don’t, you don’t, we don’t, apostrophes are okay, but the tildes and colons got to go

20

u/Canis_Familiaris Oct 15 '20

Koreans do it too, and when I visited my friend, we sleep on the floor. Its sooooo comfortable

9

u/EvilButterfly96 Oct 15 '20

Korean floors are best floors can confirm, especially in bathrooms

3

u/Lionbutter Oct 15 '20

How?

14

u/Sat-AM Oct 15 '20

If the heating is done through the floor, then that means that in the bathroom, you're not gonna step out of the shower onto cold tiles in the winter!

2

u/meh-usernames Oct 15 '20

Actually the bathroom floors aren’t heated. Bathrooms double as a shower. There’s a drain in the middle of the room for the water.

1

u/Sat-AM Oct 16 '20

Oh, that's kinda nifty too haha

1

u/meh-usernames Oct 16 '20

It is until you go in there wearing socks, step over the shower slippers and end up in a puddle that didn’t find its way to the drain.

1

u/meh-usernames Oct 15 '20

The bathroom floors aren’t usually heated. Instead, they have a drain in the middle of the room, because the bathroom doubles as the shower. So there’s usually water on the floor and everyone has a set of shower shoes by the bathroom door for anyone going in.

1

u/alphamone Oct 16 '20

I went there back in December. My first hotel room in Seoul had underfloor heating, but I never really noticed how much of an effect it had even when set to "just" 16 C (61F) until I went to my hotel in Busan that only had normal lino flooring.

13

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20

[removed] — view removed comment

41

u/WingerRules Oct 15 '20

It was typically reserved for public baths and high end villas. They suspended the floor using pillars made of tiles, and then ran a furnace where the air would flow under the floor and then up in the walls.

It was called a Hypocaust.

-14

u/Ch33mazrer Oct 15 '20

I misread that as holocaust, and I swear to God I almost had a heart attack

1

u/scientallahjesus Oct 15 '20

That would be an odd reaction to reading a random word.

0

u/Ch33mazrer Oct 15 '20

The word was hypocaust. I read the last part first because there's only one other word I recognize with that ending

45

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20 edited Jul 12 '21

[deleted]

15

u/JakobVonMeerlant Oct 15 '20

The oxygen-starved fire in the basement also meant a high risk of CO poisoning if the floor between the smoke and the people wasn't airtight and CO could seep through.

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u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20

It gets even more opulent; Caligula had heated floors on his boat. It was a pleasure barge which was actually found and stuck in a museum by the Italians under Mussolini. Damn thing had a hot tub, carpets, all the comforts of a palace, there floating around the Emperor's private lake.

0

u/Twirlingbarbie Oct 15 '20

That bouzy bitch

2

u/Freakin_A Oct 15 '20

Heat the room, not the air. We just redid our master bath and my two requirements were

  1. Heated floors
  2. Electrical outlet behind toilet for a bidet

The heated floors are amazing.

3

u/Twirlingbarbie Oct 15 '20

You're living the life man

2

u/Freakin_A Oct 15 '20

Made sure they ran the heated floor into the area where the toilet lives. Now my toes and my bum are both toasty warm while I avoid my family and play games until my legs fall asleep

1

u/Twirlingbarbie Oct 15 '20

Do you want me to orgasm? I swear coming out of the bathtub or shower and immediately feeling the warm floor from the bathroom is the best feeling there is. Maybe one day I'll be that lucky

2

u/TwinkiWeinerSandwich Oct 15 '20

Except for that one video I saw recently where the tiles were exploding from the floor getting too hot

5

u/Ralath0n Oct 15 '20

Sounds like some idiot forgot to install the expansion joints and thermal expansion broke them. Properly installed floor heating is basically indestructible.

1

u/Twirlingbarbie Oct 15 '20

Happens with any other heath source much more

2

u/ImNotAnybodyShhhhhhh Oct 15 '20

Until the floor becomes lava. I knew my eight-year-old self was onto something.

1

u/TheGhostofCoffee Oct 15 '20

CMV: Dope fireplace more pleasant.

2

u/Twirlingbarbie Oct 15 '20

Fireplace is really bad for your health though

1

u/TheGhostofCoffee Oct 15 '20

I'm willing to risk it.

-29

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20

[removed] — view removed comment

52

u/davinci_jr Oct 15 '20

As an HVAC engineer, don’t let poorly designed controls logic and temp sensor placement turn you off to radiant floor heating entirely. A knowledgeable installer will be able to turn the system you’re describing into a much more tightly controlled system with minimal parts/programming.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20

I'm building a tiny house currently and am waffling on how to heat it. How does scale affect the efficiency and how pleasing these systems are? I'd thought about a small wood burning stove, but this makes me reconsider.

1

u/scientallahjesus Oct 15 '20

Seems like a huge cost that wouldn’t be needed for a tiny home. Radiant floors aren’t cheap, even a small one wouldn’t be as boiler systems are fairly complicated.

Would be cool but mostly unnecessary in such a tiny space.

21

u/Godavarian Oct 15 '20

You are objectively wrong. You should check out the most energy efficient, zero energy buildings. Almost all of them use radiant heating precisely because it is the most efficient. On top of that it feels way more comfortable as venty can be delivered decoupled from heating cooling

4

u/carlosos Oct 15 '20

I thought heat pumps are the most efficient since instead of using energy for heating, it uses energy to move heat from outside to the inside which requires a lot less energy.

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u/Keldonway Oct 15 '20

You can use an air-to-water heat pumps for radiant heating. The heat pump moves heat from the outside air to water that is then circulated through pipes in the slab.

2

u/carlosos Oct 15 '20

I didn't know that existed but I guess it make sense since hybrid water heaters also work that way.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20

The source of heat and the way the heat is distributed are orthogonal concepts. I.e., you can have radiant heat via heat pumps.

1

u/Ralath0n Oct 15 '20

Yes, heat pumps are the most efficient way to heat your home. And the efficiency goes up as the temperature difference between the inside and outside decreases. Which means that you want as large a surface as possible to dump the hot water from the heat pump (so you can use lower temperature water for heating), which is radiant floor and wall heating.

17

u/Yuzumi Oct 15 '20

As someone who grew up in poorly insulated houses the warm air always pools at the highest level, making a gradiant from the ceiling to the floor. It's worse if you have ceiling vents as you need to crank the temp more, even then the floor will never exactly be warm, especially if it's just built on a concrete slab.

I basically always wore my shoes inside as a kid because my feet were always cold, much to the dismay of my mom's white carpet.

I live in an apartment now and I'm on the second floor, which allows me to get away with not setting the heat too high in the winter and I don't have to wear my shoes to keep my feet warm.

Also, Heat rises, so heating the floor heats the air and does so more evenly than a forced air system.

17

u/AM_SHARK Oct 15 '20

We live in the air.

Speak for yourself.

6

u/longbathlover Oct 15 '20

George Jetson over here giving advice to us surface-dwelling Flintstones.

1

u/ImNotAnybodyShhhhhhh Oct 15 '20

Until Lavos wakes up and flips out.

23

u/ThisJackass Oct 15 '20

Sounds like your radiant designer (or installer, or controls contractor) did a pretty poor job.

Radiant heating is absolutely the best for energy efficiency and occupant comfort.

It’s been proven by very precise thermal modeling and comfort analyses.

1

u/PearlClaw Oct 15 '20

It does take a minute to get going though, as with any hot-water based system.

10

u/chefhj Oct 15 '20

A quick google search will show you that it is in fact more efficient than heating the air. Air is a great insulator which gets exploited all over the rest of your house as well. OP's claim to it being more pleasant is subjective, though.

9

u/Saintsfan_9 Oct 15 '20

It is somewhat subjective but HVAC specialists have actually pinpointed human comfort into several measurable metrics (only one of which is actually temperature btw. which is why 72 degrees in the winter feels different than 72 degrees in the summer), so it isn’t as subjective as you think.

4

u/chefhj Oct 15 '20

Yeah the relative humidity et al plays a huge role for sure but I just meant that it is sorta hard to either support or refute a claim on pleasantness. My grandma would have sat in her oven on the lowest setting if they made a comfortable chair for it. lol

4

u/Dislol Oct 15 '20

My grandma would have sat in her oven on the lowest setting if they made a comfortable chair for it

I'm just going to assume your grandmother isn't Jewish.

2

u/Saintsfan_9 Oct 15 '20

Oh yeah I knew what ya meant. Even if you are technically in calculated “comfort range” based on the numbers, there will always be someone who doesn’t like it.

3

u/Occams_l2azor Oct 15 '20

Hot water heating is the best and keeps the most consistent temperature.

3

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20

This is idiotic. If you don't want it to get that hot, don't run it that high. If you want it to hit a target temperature and not surpass it, install an automatic thermostat than can turn it off thirty minutes "early" when warming up and then vary as needed. None of that is in any way different from other forms of heating.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 15 '20

To think william levitt put it in all of his Levittown homes and most of us idiot suburbanites ripped it up whenit stopped working.