@darthlaurel As far as I searched, 80% of houses in Hokkaido introduce central heating😉 But, besides there, I've never seen it😂 Thank you for watching!
This defies imagination. There are areas around the world that are 10x poorer but they heat the entire house. Here in Easter Europe even the poorest of people heat their homes even in spring and autumn. The table with heaters underneath looks like something somebody in a 3rd world country would use. It's insane at the level of civilization, wealth and technology Japan is.
This video randomly popped up in my recommendations on a cold January day in rural England, fascinating insight into a different culture’s experience of the war on chilblains, instant subscribe
As a Canadian living out on the Prairies, I can't imagine a home without thick insulation, draft protection and centralized natural gas heating. Our winters are as brutal as anything in Siberia Russia.
It helps to remember Japan spans the distance from Key West, Florida in the south to Montreal, Quebec in the north, so there's lot of regional variations. He mentioned one that region does regularly use central heating, Hokkaido, the northernmost island. Which makes sense as it has a similar climate to eastern Canada.
@@zumurudlilit14 cm (5.5 inch) glass batt insulation inside and 100 cm (4 inch rigid open weave glass insulation under siding and 4 inch rigid Styrofoam insulation around foundation and under basement floor slab. That R60 for roof, R28 upper walls, R28 foundation basement walls and R40 for basement floor. My Canadian home is less than 30 years old and meets Canadian R2000 building envelope code. All interior walls have a heavy gauge polyethylene vapor barrier (including all electrical wall out let housings) and exterior insulation is protected by metalized Tyvek. Furnace employs a fresh air heat exchanger to recover waste heat while heating up fresh air and built in humidifier because our winters are nose bleed dry
This is pipes issue, in my country we just isolate pipes cause we have harsh winter. No risk of bursting, in countries with warm winter, their pipes are not protected and can burst.
I live in japan and even though we get snow there are many ways to prevent freezing pipes. We have relief valves that will open when water freezes to prevent to much pressure. also we have a gas/electric hybrid tankless water heater. and during the winter as long as you have power it will keep the pipes warm enough to prevent freezing. plus in newer homes all of the rooms have aircons, so you just warm the room you are using instead of the entire home.
What a beautiful house. I live in a very old house here in the USA that is heated by steam radiators that are controlled in each room by turning a steam valve. Despite how old steam heating technology is, I find it a pleasant way to heat a house during cold months.
it is. but i think the main reason is like many cultures ego fights change. it is not the japanese way. ironic in a country where some technology is taken up, building is on of tho trades, extremely stupidly stuck in old styles.
Great video and explanation, thank you! As an American who has spent months in Japan during cold months, I can easily admit how difficult it can be for westerners to adapt to.
It's not just a matter of convenience. In thick-walled well-insulated homes, it's actually less inefficient to heat the whole house to a low level than to not heat at all and then boost heat as you move from room to room (which means heating up the cold walls). And in some climates you have to heat because you will get mold if you heat some rooms and leave others totally unheated (hot air holds more moisture and then when it leaks into a room with cold walls, or you breath in the cold bedroom overnight, the moisture it condenses on the walls). In Germany the rental contracts specify that you have to heat to a certain minimum temperature and if you don't and you get mold, you are liable for the very high costs of treating it.
That’s quite interesting. In UK we need something like that cause it’s such a hotly contested thing with mould and whether it’s landlord or tenants fault.
Key word is well insulated. A lot of places are not. When there was a really bad cold snap here, a lot of people died, especially the elderly, because of no insulation and heating
I suppose in some really cold climates you might have to worry about mold but I think most places that don't get extremely cold (well below zero) don't have to worry about mold.
I live in the Netherlands and the last few decades temperatures have rarely dropped below -5 °C for any length of time, but there are definetely homes, mainly homes with poor insulation or poor ventilation, that have a mold-problem. I have seen some very bad ones.
@@BoguardisReally not true. Any high humidity climate is at high risk for mold damage. Cold only enhances your ability to create those more humid conditions in an otherwise drier climate.
This is a great video. Thank you for putting it out. My wife and I just bought our first home (in Chiba Prefecture) and it is newly built. We were excited when we bought it because it actually has double-paned windows, which are still rare in Japan. However, we were very disappointed in the summer with how hot the walls got and likewise, as winter has come on, by how cold our house gets. It is significantly colder than our old apartment, even though that place had single pane windows. As the video points out, there are a lot of reasons why Japanese homes don't have central heating/cooling. But I would also like to point out some additional reasons, and particularly why Japanese homes are very poorly insulated. 1) The biggest reason Japanese homes are poorly insulated is simple: the building codes don't require good insulation. The home construction industry in Japan is very corporatized, much more so than in the US or other countries. In the US, it is much more common for private individuals to be involved in designing, hiring contractors, and even participating in the construction or renovation of their homes. This is pretty much non-existent in Japan. Home builders are very large companies with pretty rigid sets of home styles and designs and much of the construction work takes place in factories, with on-site assembly. Japanese building codes don't require any heating or cooling systems to be built into homes. Basically, the home purchasers are responsible for buying the A/C systems (which as heat pumps also function as heating units) and having them installed. Basically, heating and cooling systems in Japan are treated like any other type of home electronics/appliances. Home builders don't pay for the heating/cooling systems, and they don't pay for the energy needed to run them. Therefore, they don't care if homes are poorly insulted and have high heating costs. Every amount of non-mandated insulation basically increases their construction costs. 2) Japanese people don't know any better. This is touched upon in the video, but basically, Japanese people have always lived in homes that are crazy hot in the summer, and crazy cold in the winter. They are used to it, and while it's not comfortable, they just view it as the way things are. Japanese culture has a particular aspect that reinforces this way of thinking: 'gaman.' To 'gaman' means to endure, and Japanese people are taught from the time they are young that life is hard and you need to just 'gaman', or grin and bear it without complaining. While this is probably overall a good way of approaching life, it also means that problems that make life difficult in Japan don't get as much attention as they do in other countries. Basically, Japanese gaman culture means that problems often don't get resolved as quickly as they would in other countries, where people tend to complain when things don't run smooth. 3) Japan's architectural/culture focus on ventilation. The specific heating strategies used by Japanese homes in the past (fires/stoves, and in recent decades kerosine heaters) have necessitated basically constant ventilation to prevent death from smoke and carbon monoxide poisoning. Furthermore, Japan's summers are crazy hot and humid, which leads to constant growth of mold, particularly in shower and bathroom areas. Ever further, Japanese homes are quite small, and in the past have had large numbers of people living in them (not so much any more), but this has put an emphasis on constant ventilation to keep healthy air flow. In the US and in Europe, all of these issues are managed completely differently. Homes tend to be well sealed, heating doesn't put smoke or carbon monoxide into the air, humidity is much lower, and the homes are bigger. Therefore, modern homes in the West tend to be completely air tight, and ventilation systems work on carefully exchanging air slowly while incorporating heat exchange to prevent energy loss. The point here is that, it can seem rather pointless to Japanese people to have really thick walls and good insulation when they're going to constantly want to have windows open or ventilation systems constantly swapping air with the outside.
Hey shemlawlor, I appreciated you taking the time to type out that comment. I absorbed additional context from it adjacent to the video. Thanks so much!
Basicaly what you are saying is that Japaniese people don't know what chimney is and how its works and maybe this explain why they don't have even something like Korean Ondol floor heating. I have seen some exuses about how Japan is highly earthquake zone and that is why thy don't have widespread piping heating systems and stuff, but that's just don't make any sense for more simple heating solutions.
It sounds to me like gaman (accept and go along to get along) why Japan with a much older culture stagnated while the barbarians of Europe kept progressing.
I'm from the USA and I live in a 200+ year old house. We can't afford a new furnace for 10k so we use space heaters and our wood burning stove. We have rooms we don't use and we don't heat them. This is ok because there's no pipes running through these areas. However one day recently the temperature was -20F and the temperature inside the house dropped to 39F so our pipes froze and we had no water for a few days. This is a hazard of not heating your home properly. Also we need to heat constantly or it's not possible to warm it up to a reasonable temperature within several hours because it's just too cold in winter here where I live. We have to pay $500-$600 for the electricity to heat our home. On the plus side, we have 4 bedrooms and 5 acres of land. There's about 4 rooms in our house we don't need to use too. If you have central heating, you can still turn off the vents to unused rooms and you will not have to heat them or only heat them as needed. I have known a lot of people here in the US that do this to save on heating costs.
@@romancetips365 I love the idea of indoor tenting. Even if it's not a real "tent," plastic sheeting (drop cloths, etc.) could be strung on removable hooks and a clothesline from one wall to another up close to the ceiling, to partition off a section that you spend most of your time in. This method can be reconfigured for convenience for space, to make a small room to accommodate the dog, kids, a work station, a cozy cot, or what have you. A space heater inside this area would be all you need. Nice tents aren't that expensive, either, and they make the popup version which allows for quick setup and quick take down. Great for visiting grand kids so they can have their own private space within the house.
@@romancetips365my old house was 100 yrs old and had like 3 of those wall mounted gas heaters (one mounted in the fireplace) to warm the house, was quite nice as long as rooms had the door open, we had a space heater in the bathrooms for when we needed to be in there for more than 30 , minutes
Thank you Mr. Noa. I have visited Tokyo a few times and was in a building with apartments. Since I was out the whole day, I just used the bathroom heater and air conditioner in the room for a short time while getting to bed. I don't have a problem with temperature and it was not that cold that I couldn't stand it. It was February. Thank you for this video, I love it. Japan is a great country and people are wonderful. Best regards from Serbia. Cheers.
@@JoyceMiller-w3o I'm 68, and my arthritic knees would not cope well with cold rooms. I think I'd wind up spending all my time with my legs under the _kotatsu._
I've been renting for over 40 years now and for the first time I'm renting somewhere with central heating rather than just a fireplace in the front room [this is in UK and Ireland]. It even has double glazing which is another first for me. Last place the windows often didn't fit into the frames, there were vents in every room to the outside - great in summer, not so much in winter - and we had a couple of oil fired radiators to keep us warm, our landladies cottage was no better with just an open fire in the main room to heat the whole place. Pipes would freeze in winter so we always kept lots of bottled water on hand and the curtains would freeze to the windows when it got close to freezing. Now I'm renting a mobile home and it has double glazing, central heating and is often so warm my daughter - like today when it is definitely nippy outside - is just wearing a t-shirt indoors. I'll happily admit I don't miss the curtains frozen to the windows or the lack of running water when it gets too cold outside and central heating is good as long as you can keep the temperatures down - I know lots of boilers where the minimum you can set them to is around 70degF/20degC and the houses feel like hothouses when you go inside, couldn't survive in that heat.
@@MayYourGodGoWithYou just FYI 70F is cold. My house is set to 76F all year round. Even in Michigan where I'm from, most people set their house at 71F-72F and I always thought that was cold growing up. Here in Florida we have our house set to 76F. 70F is pretty chilly. I would start to shiver at that temp after about an hour. Maybe you're just used to being super cold all year long where you live.
Yes you could. In most parts of Japan the winters are not that cold: conversely, the summers are brutally hot, and if you lived 100 years ago you would have come to appreciate the way Japanese houses are designed to facilitate cool breezes, Nowadays, fortunately, all Japanese houses and apartments have air-conditioners, or, as we sensibly call them, "room coolers." You can get used to anything.
I have a book that details how traditional Japanese joinery is done. The concept involves creating complex connections between structural elements that use no fasteners and rely on how various faces/tapers/etc fit together in such a way as to require no nails or screws yet can be disassembled by removing a small piece of the “joinery puzzle”, allowing future replacement of rotten or damaged timbers without damaging the other components of a joint. It is an absolute masterpiece how this works and the number of different solutions to this puzzle number in the hundreds.
@@kristingallo2158idk seems like they are living there just fine, it's just not livable for you. I am not bothered by the cold as I run very hot so I would do pretty well in a house like this. Even with the central heating off in my house it's still too hot in winter
I'm from Australia and was struck by how many (unexpected) parallels there are to Australia. Many of the things you mentioned - humidity requiring ventilation, poor insulation and thin walls in older houses, no long tradition of central heating in homes, and people using smaller portable heaters (careful to turn them off when not in use!) - these are very familiar in Australia as well. Even though some parts of Australia do not experience strong winters, in the south-east of the country winters can be colder than newcomers expect. It's a common complaint from North American and European visitors that they had never felt so cold in their home country as they were living in an Australian house during winter! I realise the cultural and historical contexts are different between Japan and Australia, but it's an intriguing comparison nonetheless.
This is so true. Im from the UK and visited Sydney in July. I was surprised by how much colder I felt and just how different structurally your houses are.
I grew up in Australia in Victoria, and I remember well how cold our house became during winter due to the lack of insulation. We had an oil heater (later gas) in the lounge room, but otherwise to keep bedrooms warm we used portable heaters. Of course, during summer we had the opposite problem: we didn’t have A/C anywhere in the house, only portable fans to keep cool by, so summer days and nights could be quite uncomfortable.
I grew up in Victoria and moved to Sydney after uni. I was quite surprised at how often houses in NSW don't have central heating. In Melbourne, it's very much needed.
Norway is split in this aspect as electric space heaters are the most popular and many houses lack central heating, but others have radiators or in floor water heating. Apartment blocks are required to connect to district heating if nearby, however heat pumps supply heat at a lower price and some have switched over. Heat pumps are becoming common in houses as well. For supplemental heat most houses have a wood stove.
There were only a couple of places where I wasn't quite sure what you were saying but common sense and content got me through that. Thank you for the explanation of your homes. I live in the northeast area of the US and I don't have much money. About a half hour before I go to bed I turn on a heating pad up where my shoulders and neck will be and when I slide under the covers I put an old fashioned rubber hot water bottle down by my feet. Roasty toasty!! Thank you for sharing the inside of a typical Japanese home.
I froze in my 3DK in Fukuoka. I had one kerosene heater and one kotatsu. Winter was brutal and once I took my hot bath and jumped onto my futon and under the quilts , I did not budge.
not sure if it is legal in japan but if it is you should look into getting a diesel heater (which can also use kerosene). project farm reviewed some recently. the only issue is that you have to route 2 pipes to the outside (1 intake pipe and 1 very hot exhaust pipe that can cause a fire if not properly handled) by either creating holes in the wall or temporarily sacrificing a window and making a custom solution to fill the gap.
Thank you for watching and telling me about that😉 The places I've lived in England were student accommodations and flats so It seemed they could heat the entire building only😂
Haha. Yea. Most homes will have thermostats in different rooms for different zones. Usually at least 1 per floor and you can have one for every room if you want to pay enough. @@JapanwithNao
@@JapanwithNao there is such a thing as centralized heating for block buildings, since these are managed on a budget like the dorms you mentioned, or office buildings, but in most flats and houses you have full control over your heaters. using air conditioners for heating is also becoming popular
One more point: just because you live in a modern building, it does not mean it is big enough to contain any unused rooms. Overlarge houses are almost impossible to sell in my area and small, compact houses get all the attention of buyers.
@@JapanwithNao I own a wooden house with central underfloor heating, seperated into 10 circuits per floor, all of them are temperature controlled. 24 cm of cellulose insulation in the walls keep the heat inside, although nowadays you would probably opt for 36cm. Technically, you coud make the inside with paper walls and all.
Thank you! I watch many Japanese channels on TH-cam and have wondered why the homes are always so cold in winter. Even apartments in the cities seem to be cold.
Greetings from Finland. I could talk about this topic literally for months as I got degree in building and also years of energy engineering studies. I do not know where even to begin with this comment so I guess I will try to write about a couple of different things in as short way as I can. Finland is rather cold country with moisture absolutely everywhere as about 10% of surface area is covered by lakes, not to mention smaller bodies of water and 15-20% of the area covered by swamps. It is so cold here that you need practically constant heating for +6 months just to prevent everything freezing solid and this brings big problems with moisture management. Hundreds of years old design of Finnish log house would probably work there well like it did in many places such as USA and Canada where many immigrated to back in the day, it worked so well that others copied the design too. I do not know enough about the architecture and old architecture specially in northern Japan to compare and speculate why what things happened there. I bet you could buy a ready made building packet here in Finland, ship it there and install it and have it work there just fine, it might be bit overbuilt and over insulated for your climate if it is design for permanent residency. There's also many different styles and types ofc from wooden buildings to half masonry, concrete and different styles of log buildings. Queen of England bought and installed Finnish log cabin package to Scotland if I remember right. If you'd be heating the building with heat pump (ground source, air, or even water) you would likely be able to hold steady internal temperature in Finnish design building without spending any extra money on heating. Cooling in summer would be more effective too as way less heat would leak in. Most of buildings here are heated with District heating system where from power plant, they circulate hot (depending on season 65-115C) water that is mostly heated with waste heat from the power plant that would otherwise be dumped to body of water next to the plant or to air. This way power plant that would produce electricity with about 40-60% efficiency (depends on design of the plant) they can get to 75-85% efficiency instead. Rest of the energy goes up the chimney (That gas needs to be hot enough or corrosion problems) and running the power plant itself. I tried to be concise and not bring up too many different things while at it to not just list bunch of stuff, slight expansions added though for important side notions. If anyone would want me to expand on something or something else related, ask away.
The district heating sounds a bit like China. They use district heating in the northern cities sourced from burning coal (south China has no heat provided by the government). And you have zero control over it, they usually turn it on in mid November and sometimes that is too late.
@@Eli-s7d Communist systems are a whole different beast and I would guess they just copied that from the Russians. Here we are circulating the district heating system through out the year for multiple reasons. It's better value to sell heat to customers than to dump it as waste heat to environment. Also it is nice to have consistently hot water through the year without issues at home. Big thing with Finland too is that there aren't many days in a year when no heating of the buildings is needed, even the summer temperatures are quite low here on average. If we didn't have this district heating system here, those buildings would need to be heated by some other way and those power plants would be releasing almost the same amount of heat to environment instead of selling it to customers while producing electricity. At 2012 46% of the heating energy in Finland was produces with district heating, most of that just a byproduct of electricity production. CHP (Combined Heat and Power) is the name of those power plants. Most owned by private companies and think only one energy company is majority owned by the state. Some villages also have central district heating system where there is a power plant that just produces heat for district heating system for that village. Some towns or villages have a paper mill(s) there that produce a lot of waste heat so they get almost free district heating from those.
@@justskip4595 If you happen to write an article on all this I would be fascinated! please do, and let us know where to find it. We are moving from South Africa (nothing is insulated, everything is concrete, brick or even stone) to Norway (waves hello to new neighbour in Finland) I have a bit of a habit of building things, even though it's not my job, so alllll the geekery is welcome!
I'm in the same boat and am used to EU energy standards. It is infuriating here when a home builder is proud to have walls of 1.0W/m2K...actually bragging about this. I threw Gutex on an old house, wrapped it and calculated it now at about 0.12W/m2K...still not amazing, but better than the 1.5 I started with.
I grew up in a country where most people had well insulated homes and central heating, but my family moved constantly and usually lived in trailors or small homes without insulation. We had a kerosene heater that we would always have in whatever was acting as the family room where we lived (usually the living room, but sometimes my siblings room because there was only one bedroom so the living room was our room). It made it so that in colder months, the whole family would gather in the one room to watch tv or listen to the radio, read, study, or even take a nap. Sometimes on very cold nights my father would stay up to leave it on so my siblings or grandmother could sleep in the living room warmth. As much as friends and community members would be shocked upon finding we didn't (and couldn't) rely on central heating, I never felt that it was so weird and I know it brought many good memories of being in that shared space with my family, while going to my friends homes we'd more often than not hide away in their bedrooms. My family is sadly not close today, with some large conflicts driving wedges between different members as adults, but I'm thankful for the memories I have around that kerosene heater, and even miss it now that I live in a small studio with central heating. At night I still like to turn if off, however, and just use a small standing heater. I think I grew too accustomed to living that way.
In my area, Michigan (USA) it’s not uncommon to have cold dry winter temps of -23c and summer temps of 36c with high humidity. Most all homes have central heating and cooling, but sometimes the costs can be high for summer use, so many times owners will buy those air conditioners that hang from the window and then put it in the living room, closing all the doors to other rooms in the home that they won’t frequent much. We also have basements in almost all houses so it’s usually slightly warmer there in the winter and cooler in the summer, although humidity can really high so it’s important to have a dehumidifier. So interesting to see how different locales have different takes on keeping us comfortable in different weather
Very interesting indeed. Watching this in shorts and a T-shirt. Yesterday it was -5 degrees Celsius outside and I am grateful we DO HAVE a central heating.😀
In the UK there are heated lightweight folding clothes airers/racks. They give out a gentle ambient heat (kind to clothes and safe for fingers) and they are very low-consumption. This is key because a utility bills are so high now. The UK has a “maritime” climate that’s more humid in winter than summer, but seldom extremely hot or cold, so these clothes airers are good for winter background heating or ambient heating. No “cold shock”, and although you still need to wear a sweater, the temperature is comfortable for face and hands. I think the element in these is similar to what is in newer lightweight overblankets / throw blankets, which people often keep in the living room now - like a kotatsu on the couch! A lot of people keep these clothes dryers going as heaters all night, or all day if they are home. They weigh almost nothing, you can carry them one-handed, so they’re very very easy to position anywhere.
Hi from Finland and as I been to UK a lot I always amazed about the quality of the buildings or actually the lack of it. People live in damp, mold infested cold homes in the winter. It is amazing to me how they dont die of pneumonia. I spend most of my time in winter in my underwear or something very ligh. My home is 24C-25C year around.
@@teresalehtonen8499 Yep. And this habit of drying clothes indoors on racks without outside ventilation only adds to the moisture problem. But you have to realise how different the moisture problem that high humidity in winter is from the dry winters of Finland. The construction technology is TOTALLY different and applying cold climate construction methods to a temperate or "maritime" climate actually creates worse problems for the building. It's only relatively recently that proper heating, insulation and ventilation has been possible at relatively low budgets in these climates. Ventilation of moisture in winter is the problem.
@@teresalehtonen8499 yes, it’s crappier, and since the last 40nyears, with the commodification and coroporatisation of homes, it has been getting crappier.
@@teresalehtonen8499 Everything in the UK was privatised in the Thatcher years and afterwards. This included a massive stock of housing built at pub,ic expense. So Brits (especially in England) more for housing, electricity, gas, telecoms, postage, public transport and water & sewerage - and we get a much, much worse service. Do not let your nation’s “family silver” get stolen and then sold back to you dmaged, for higher prices.
@@teresalehtonen8499 Moisture management seems to be a real challenge for foreigners. To the point that a child of Africans died recently because of mould. It's a skill issue actually. Mould is rare for English people. How do Fins deal with moisture levels and prevent mould?
Fascinating - thank you. I also grew up in a house without central heating in the UK in the '70s and '80s. The front room had a gas fire, and the bathroom had a wall mounted electric heater - and that was it. Interestingly, although it was a small 3 bed semi built before WW2 it had fireplaces in 2 of the bedrooms that were no longer used, so we'd managed to make the place colder than it was originally designed to be LOL. Couple that with single glazing in iron windows that buckled in the Winter and you could wake up to mini snow-drifts on the inside window sill of your bedroom!! Getting dressed under the covers for a 6am paper round, etc. Wow memories flooding back... #oldfart
Hi! Yes times have changed. I'm German born in the 60s and remember our house in winter like you said; one heated place (ours was the kitchen) and in the evening a minimal warmed living room for watching TV for 2 hours...
Ha! I lived in the UK in the 80s and remember turning on my heater winter mornings and holding my clothes in front of it to dry out from the dampness….from my bed bc it was too cold to get until my clothes were warm. You can see the steam of the damn clothes rising. Crazy!
I grew up in a 1900 house in Scotland it had 1970s central heating no insulation was not a warm house. Ice formed on the INSIDE of the bedroom windows over night
You had a heater in the bathroom? Luxury! :) 60s born Brit here, exactly the same childhood. The kitchen was warm at mealtimes, the living room had a gas fire, single glazing everywhere and… that was it. We had metal ‘flying saucers’ heated by a standard incandescent light bulb (something else that no longer exists) which would be put in the bed (heavy woolen blankets, no foreign ‘continental quilt’ nonsense) a half hour before bed time, then removed, to create a two foot pool of warmth under the freezing sheets. Frequently woke in the morning to thick ice on the windows, from the condensed water vapour of our breaths. And you tell kids that today, and will they believe you? ;)
Smile! Our current home in North Carolina (have lived in 10 houses in 50 years!) has a small powder room off the front door that gets very toasty, despite our efforts to control the heat flow there. I’ve taken to using it as a sort of large clothes dryer by doing the same technique with a wall-to-wall rod, as shown here, to hang up washed clothes….so totally convenient & energy efficient! Thanks for all your wonderful vids on Japan!! 💕
@ actually - the 2 full baths do have heat and fan units in the ceiling - which my husband refuses to let me use because they are over 40 years old, potentially not safe anymore and would just be a pain to remove/replace. The powder room is definately just an exhaust fan set-up. Grew up in Chicago and this is the only house I’ve ever lived in that had heat/fan ceiling combos…might not be as common as you think!!
@@ФеофанЭтополедолжнобытьзаполне Без газа может и плохо но японцы намного здоровее. Газ однажды закончится как и любые природные ресурсы. И вот те кто привык топить у себя до +30 зимой те вымрут, а те кто понимаю что природные ресурсы не бесконечные те давно адаптировались и будут жить.
@@apTimON ну понятно. Это все не про*бы правительства, это целенаправленная работа, проводимая осознанными усилиями всей нации в едином порыве с тем, чтобы подготовиться к моменту когда Солнце угаснет. Тогда-то японцы с англичанами и заживут!
outdated for sure. When we only had access to small electric heaters this was how electricity was saved during winter. One winter I ran a small fan heater in my garage as I was working from home, and the electrify usage from that one small fan heater (only used during work hours) was the same as our entire central heating for the whole house. It is always more efficient and cost effective to manage drafts and heat the whole house (efficiently). This is not limited to electric or gas heating. I have a mate that lives down near Crookwell, he had a fireplace plumbed through his whole house so the heat from a small cooking stove heats an entire four bedroom house through our harsh winter. You could easily apply this method to Japanese houses - even the traditional wooden ones. In fact the ample airflow would help in this case.
Had a friend that heated his entire house via electric radiators in the UK, his electric bill was tiny but he did know unscrupulous electricians. I seriously doubt it was good for his health either.
I live in central Japan surrounded by two sets of alps. My house is 22 years old and has a central air-conditioning heating system for the winter months. It also serves as a central cooling system for the long hot summers. My walls are well insulated and all windows are double-glazed. AFAIAA my house is the only one in my immediate neighborhood that is designed this way. We don't get too much snow in winter but at an elevation of 400 meters it does get pretty cold (average 7C to -4C). Summers are very humid (rarely below 75%) and average temperatures are between 31C and 20C.
@@bat-ireeduienkhbat7461 Average temperatures. In January it will sometimes touch minus 10C overnight. Much colder places in Japan and if you're living in rented accommodation you are going to feel very cold indoors.
quite interesting as I am about to move to Maine, USA and am considering a large house. This video awoke me to the issue of living comfortably in a cold climate, which was something I took for granted in New York City in the smaller accommodations of an apartment. Also to appreciate the frugal mindset of the Japanese and how this is reinforced on a daily basis by the technology on which the society is based was quite interesting! Thanks for your effort!
I love Maine but you need to be aware when you buy. Is the house insulated is a big question. Can you shut off some rooms? How much oil did the previous people use, or how many cords of wood. Does it have new energy efficient windows and doors? What is the radon level. When was the septic last cleaned and how old is it. Is your drive easily plowable. Does the house already have a metal roof and vinyl siding. Some of these questions may not pertain to your house but buying here is "different". Good luck
An outdoor wood boiler is crucial to live north of Bennington, VT. Especially coupled with floor heating and as a hot water source. They're extremely efficient, only need to be loaded once per day, and use an inexpensive locally available renewable resource.
I moved from a late 1970s condo in California to a late '80s apartment building in Chicago and the difference is so good it is difficult to convey sufficiently. The california place was drafty but not well ventilated, so summers were too warm, winters too cold, and heating too expensive. The Chicago place seals up tightly with the windows closed so even when it's 20F the heaters only run for a few minutes before switching off. In the summer, I open the windows and the cross-ventilation is good enough that I rarely need to run the A/C. If I were to move to Maine, I'd ensure that the windows are all modern double-panes and the walls and ceiling are well insulated. Comfort is worth the cost, and your heating will be proportionally lower.
I really enjoyed this video. Thank you for making it. I also appreciate the effort you have put into speaking the English language so well especially as the grammar is so different to Japanese and many things don't make sense. Good job!
How are the floors heated by the heat pump? Is it hot water, hot air or electricity under the floor? In the US, heat pumps primarily just heat the air in the room, not under the floor. Under the floor sounds better, and would like to know how that works in Germany. Thanks.
@@BeDoHave-so8nr the heat pump heats water and pumps it around in the floors. I'm installing water based floor heating right now for my geothermal heat pump.
@@erik.... My uncle built a log home with in-floor heating, in the 70s. He felled the logs on his own land, cut them into half-rounds, and used them for the walls. Poured concrete slab with pipes embedded in the concrete. Uncle Roy was not an educated man, just super smart!
@@user-roadwander i dont, i live in Sweden. 😄 It is however possible to cool using the fluid that is pumped around down in the well, by connecting it to a convector cooler which gives you pretty much free cooling, except for the circulation pump and fan.
I grew up in Japan. I'm hafu. At my aunts and uncle's homes and my grandmother's house was a traditional wooden structure and we use kerosene stoves and kept a tea kettle on them to increase the humidity inside the house to keep it warm. The house we lived in was a hybrid Japanese western style house. We had window air conditioners in a few of the rooms and had a big large kerosene heater right off the entrance that we use to keep warm. My mother kept several pots of water on top to help increase the humidity. The one advantage of the kerosene stoves was you could make water for tea or cook things like mochi, fish and other things. We wore layers of clothing and a sweater inside. And this was common in the United States until the mid 1970s and '80s when central heating started becoming popular. Before that people had to do similar things, even the United States. I miss family gatherings around the kotatsu. A cousin of ours lived in a very old home and they had a deep open hearth or inori. There was a centerpiece that could be placed in there and it held 2 tatami to cover up the opening for non-winter use of the room.
One nasty old lady's remark: not "inori", "irori". I lived in a my in-laws' house in good old windy Gunma. We had no air conditioning or central heating, only kerosene heaters and a kotatsu. I don't miss them very much, because a, the kotatsu gave me the grandmother of all colds whenever I used it, b, the room temperature was one-digit (Celsius) about an hour after I had switched off the heater (family slogan: "If the temperature is two-digit, you're fine"), c, I regularly measured 2-5 degrees Celsius in our living-room and bedroom in the morning, d, bedroom is in singular form because we could only afford to heat one, so our whole family of five (including three kids, and the youngest was 4 at the beginning of our stay) used my husband's old bedroom, e, I often found ice in the kitchen on the window sill. Yes, inside, with everything shut properly, f, and I used a lot of "F" words because of this one: my fingers swelled twice their normal size whenever I worked on my computer at night in the aforementioned 2-5 degrees, which happened very often (no thank you, Lehman Brothers and doing piecework for a little extra cash). Buy my oh my, running against the strong winter wind made my kids the best runners of their school and gave them excellent lungs. One of them is still pursuing an active sport career and another sings in three different choirs. Now we live in Europe and we have central heating, but we must heat carefully because of the skyrocketing gas prices. So right now I'm wearing my old hanten, which I bought in Gunma. I had to patch it up several times over the past years, but it still keeps me warm.
I’m in Georgia right now with no central heating. We use space heaters and keep room doors closed at night to keep the heat in…Lots of warm blankets on the bed.
@kellymoses8566 I disagree all the houses I saw built before the mid-70s had either steam heat or a wall heater. Steam is not central air or central heating.
Thank you for this video. We bought a kayabuki minka recently in Nara City and moved in at the end of last month, winterizing has been a learning experience. Once we get PR, we’re going to remodel and add central HVAC. Winter’s and summer’s extreme temperatures aren’t a reason to suffer while at home.
You aren't getting central HVAC in old houses like that unless your budget is in the ¥10,000,000 range. You can't simply run ducting around an old structure that was never made for it. You can get away with it to a certain degree with houses made in the last 30ish years, but even then, you aren't getting it everywhere. I honestly don't mean this as a dig, but to save you a lot of money. Put everything you can into external insulation, a decent vapour barrier and a certain amount of airtightness. You can't completely wrap an older house since you will end of getting funky mould in places. Also make sure that the external membrane is brought in around the best quality windows that you can afford. Also don't forget to insulate the roofspace and floor. Please also confirm if you haven't already that you don't have a wood foundation......if you do, then say goodbye to your kids' college fund. Insulation, insulation, insulation. No point at all of any kind of central system, when all that energy is going to leak right out.
@@NihonKaikan unless he's really lucky the best he can hope for foundation wise is that the wooden beams are in those little precast concrete stand offs. not going to say it would be easy to run a central hvac(i'd just run mini splits with heat pumps), but they would have a fair shot running it underneath the floor. personally i hate floor vents,but to each their own.
Thank you for this informative video! I have a great respect for the people and traditions of Japan. My favorite bands are from Japan. I hope this winter is warmer for everyone.
Honestly i truly am thankful for channels like this, helps me bridge the global gap on things and understand how and why another culture does it in different ways. Cheers and much love from Canada keep up the great content.
Thank you for this very interesting video. I'm a 81 years old German. When I was a child, we did not have central heating. Only the kitchen was warm. If there was a bathroom, it was only heated once or twice in the week for bathing. It was different in big cities, where central heatings were more common.
Hi I'm living in Berlin now, an old Turkish lady told me they didn't have bathrooms when we moved here. I'm also interested in the tartarian buildings take over theory, what do you know /mean with "if there were bathrooms"?? Liebe grüße
@@pruost Till today, I prefer my sleeping room unheated. Last night it was -3 degrees Celsius outside the houes and 9.5 degrees in my sleeping room. I use typical German covers. The bed was cosy warm.
I also live in Germany and my mom told the exact thing about bathrooms. She said that there was only one bathroom and two toilets (one for the women the other for men), which were located in the attic btw, in the whole building. Every family that lived in the building was given a key for the toilets and bathroom. She said that she and her female neighbor who was also her friend would always go to the toilet together, because they found the attic creepy@@pruost
There was a similar method in Spain called “mesa camilla” those tables were traditionally round an d had a round space underneath to put hot stones or similar and the table was covered in a big tablecloth that you woul use to cover your lap. Your feet and up to the height of the table were kept warm.
Hello There Nao ,Hope you are well , Great video and very interesting and enjoyable to watch , your Home looks lovely , Thank you for sharing , Take care 👍👍
This reminds me of 'South From Granada' by Gerald Brenan, where he describes the traditional family seated around a table with charcoal heater below. Over the course of a few months, the 'normal loving relationships' somehow deteriorate. But there's no escape. The heated toilet seat sounds like a good option.
Almost every Japanese aircon is built with reversal valves...but most Japanese people don't understand this and think kerosene is cheaper/more efficient. Logic? No thanks.
Not ironic at all considering the fact that our manufacturing is a shell of what it used to be. Luckily we have plenty of trees so I can heat my home with wood.
Its so true how things that don't make sense just become normal, in the UK a lot of houses still don't have mixer taps in the bathrooms or toilets. This was because it used to be seperate so needed a seperate tap but even though this isn't true anymore and hasn't been for decades, and kitchens usually have them, even new houses are built without them in bathrooms and toilets.
Central heating in Germany is different. We have individual heaters which are sourced by a central heating system. So we can raise the temp of the whole apt. or house to a moderate low temp to keep rooms from freezinh while heating individual rooms which are used frequently to a more comfortable temp. I live in a very small house with no central heating but with individual heating systems to save energy. But the central heating with individual heating units that have individual thermostats is the rule in German houses. Which can be quite energy efficient as well. Could be earthquake preparedness a reason for not using a US style central heating? I know you should snuff out every flame in an earthquake warning. Which would not be possible in the old central heating US style.
Thank you for watching and sharing about the central heating in Germany😉 The earthquake could be another reason why we don't have it😃 But I didn't find the opinion😂
the reason is centuries old architecture and infrastructure that had no access to the kind of recourses the US does. updating would be abysmal cost and difficulty and it's not like there are enough recourses either.
Hi - I’m from UK and grew up in a house without central heating until my teens in 1971. We used coal fired stoves with a back-boiler system on the kitchen stove for hot water, our bedrooms had gas fires. On cold winter mornings you woke up to find ice on the inside of your bedroom window. I was interested to see a traditional Japanese irori in your video. One problem with these given the lightweight wood and paper-screen construction of traditional Japanese homes is that they easily set the entire house on fire if it collapsed during an earthquake. This happened on a large scale during the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923 which devastated Tokyo. Unfortunately it happened around midday when many families were using their charcoal hearths to cook meals, which led to enormous firestorms as many houses collapsed and ignited. Enjoyed watching the communal game of Riichi mahjong at 3.54 around the Kotatsu heater. Nice Kokushi Musou (13 orphans ) hand !
Interesting video! I have visited Japan several times in winter, but never really experienced this as hotels but also publicly accessible old houses like museums generally are well heated. Hotels actually often have the opposite problem: Centrally regulated A/C systems that are set to heating regardless of outside temperatures. From October to March, the A/C will be heating, not cooling. Even when it's well over 20 degrees outside (and even warmer inside). Last trip I stayed in Okayama in a hotel where it was 28 dgrees inside....and couldn't even open a window. Didn't get much sleep....
I stayed in Fukuoka in the months of April and May..it was a bit chilly in the mornings, but it was fine. I like a cool bedroom for sleeping. I handle cooler temperatures better than hot and humid, but I am Canadian. 🤷♀️
I hate humid weather so much. Not only does it make it feel hotter (even at lower temperature which isn't a huge deal I guess) but it also makes evaporative cooling impossible to do through sweating. So when you sweat it just traps even more heat. I went to Florida for a couple weeks and almost died a couple times I think. I also got massively ill.
I would further argue that earthquakes are key aspect to this. Having to fix the pipes after every earthquake would be extremely expensive. Just like with the very lightweight traditional style of construction, which is also heavily accustomed to the shaky ground beneath.
Yup. Typhoons as well. Plus with standards constantly being updated for new houses it becomes more ideal to have permanent fixtures such as a big central heating furnace and house construction to make it worth it.
It also contributes to the bad insulation. Door gaps were made deliberately large so that in case of an earthquake that deformed the frame, the smaller door can still be opened with ease. Also kerosene is probably the only way you could get warm right after a huge one that would take off the grid and the gas.
I grew up in our countryside with cold floors and drafty rooms. It was believed at some point that fresh air is good to breathe, so it was let in from everywhere. It absolutely sucked because we used no heaters of any kind, just grin and bear it while too cold to do anything but stay under covers or go work outside. 😂
Interesting, also here in Italy we have high ceiling houses but we all have central eating system, or to be clear: we have different solutions. District heating from steam power plants that distribute the heating to the houses. Or methane network. In every flat we have our own boiler that powers the radiators and the hot water in the house. With the thermostat we regulate the temperature of the house also to save money
In my grandparents house, they used a cast iron stove to cook and heat the basement, and we spent much of the time during winter down there (they got a central system later for the rest of the house) but I liked the stove - it was nice splitting the wood and setting it up to dry for use for next year, and the food cooked on it was great
I lived in Japan for 22 years, 9 of those in Nagano, near Iiyama the snowiest area in mainland Japan. The cold was challenging. Involved a lot of building air barriers. Most rooms had double windows, except for one. That bedroom was always cold. Being in construction I can guess that a central air system is just too much for the older houses and in the newer ones the walls are still much thinner than houses in western countries. Very little space left for plumbing etc. There's also the electric load. Most main panels go to 200A in North America for example. Where as in Japan a lot of homes still get by on 30A main breakers. Some have 40 or even up to 60, with the max usually being 100 for very demanding homes.
How did houses with piped water avoid freezing and breaking? Where I live, if the heat goes out for more than a day when the temperature is 0°F (-18°C) outside, there is a significant risk of water pipe damage.
This...100%. I got my panel upgraded to 100A 25 years ago and for this I had to be put on TEPCOs account as a "factory" at that time, with new cabling run from the pole. Don't you miss the days of turning on a toaster and someone else turns on the heater...whole house goes dark.
I wonder how they deal with the plumbing living like this. Hokkaido for instance has a climate similar to northern europe, not heating means pipes break all the time, you have to keep them above the frost barrier if filled! If you do not have central heating you probably have pipe damages every year. Do they simply live with it (btw. some Texans learned that the hard way a few years ago when they were hit by a blizzard)
@@werpu12 Hokkaido builds better than the main island and has for a long time. All cold climates have a drainback feature to get excess water out and avoid freezing. Modern homes are also built with enough insulation and are sealed tight 高気密高断熱 so it's never that cold inside. You can heat the whole house with an aircon or two.
Thanks for the eye opening video! I guess those houses are built more for the warmer months than the colder ones. But, it looks pretty unpleasant, especially if you can see your breath. I think there should be at least ONE warm and cozy room, or even a sauna.
Thanks for explaining all this about heating in Japan, the thought had crossed my mind in the past that rural places often looked like they got very cold in winter. It makes a lot of sense when taken in the Japanese culture and context which you so well explained.
I can see why subfloor heating is becoming more common in newer homes - once installed, it's cheaper, more efficient, and can be sectioned off by room.
I don't like warm feet. It is not natural. Of course I do not like cold feet either, the best is if I do not feel if my feet are warm or cold, meaning I am somehow between my own limits.
@@duudsuufd My uncle has it in his house and I'm not the biggest fan of it. It's more efficient and probably the future, but it takes a long time to heat up a room if it's cold in there.
Indeed, 14 degrees Celsius is considered a minimum temperature in North-western Europe conditions to prevent mould growth. In humid conditions there is also risk of asthma and other respiratory diseases. As a child we had one oil stove in the living room and ice on the bedroom windows. But the school classes were full with “green double-snot river” faced kids.
cost efficient yes, but not very warm to remain cost efficient :) gas convectors and tile stoves are the cheapest and warmest solution in a well insulated brick house, but not always an option.
@@solarydaysWhat century do you live in. 😂 With water to water heat pump and underfloor heating the house stays at 22°C year round and doesn't cost more than 50€ in the coldest months.
Space heaters use electric heating which is 100% efficient. If you're not effectively heating a home with space heaters it's because of the setup, not the technology.
This brings back memories. I used to teach middle school, and in the winter everyone wore multiple layers under their uniforms and work clothes, often supplemented with kairo body warming packs. I had silk thermal-wear I brought from my home country under my suit for self-preservation. The only place I remember being warm was the teacher's room. I think some schools brought in portable heaters to the classroom but I don't recall if any of 5 I worked at did. One of my apartments had no heating unit, so I had a cylindrical white kerosene heater just like the one in the video. I always shut it down at night, since I was concerned about CO poisoning - nights were very cold.
No central heating & even drying cloth indoor heater, should lead to strong condensations, specially all windows, damp wood inside, smell & damaging all wooden things inside?
@user-vp5iy8ec9q That's a good point! More like Tatami got damaged especially when they are newly introduced in the house! I think pillars are fine...😂 Thank you for watching!
I recently bought space heaters because my central heating has a mind of its own when it wants to work. Just the small space heaters have doubled our electricity usage. Which explains to me why kerosene stove heaters in Japan with the rising electricity prices. But I’m terrified of fires from those.
Not just fires but indoor air pollution as well. Unburnt hydrocarbons, VOCs, CO and CO2. Never burn fuels in enclosed spaces without adequate exhaust or ventilation! I suggest retrofitting your place if possible with a pellet heater or wood stove.
@@corthirteenth94 Kerosene is a very clean burning fule. Just get a co2 and co detector and keep them near the unit, you will see it reaches equilibrium even in very non-leaky homes at safe levels
I’m very surprised how similar this is to my family’s lifestyle in Ohio. Our home is well insulated, yes, but only has a 37 square meter footprint and is heated entirely by one portable radiator. We do not have the option to turn our heater off in the winter however, because our harsh winters will cause our pipes to freeze and burst, flooding our homes. The worst winter days here can reach -30 degrees Celsius, but most of the winter hovers around 0 degrees. I love the idea of a kotatsu though. This seems like a very cozy and efficient way stay warm and bring the family together. We might try to make one ourselves! 😊
Research this well before you do, so that you don't create a fire hazard. I would research the pros and the cons as well as find out how many burns were caused by kotatsu, if this info is even findable.
@ That’s exactly what my wife and I discussed. We decided to use a heat source that pipes into the enclosure rather than a source within the enclosure for that very reason. Good looking out though.
I just had an inverter mini-split heat pump installed. It heats my whole house! I was heating with baseboard electric heaters, which are now backup and for extreme cold. I feel grateful. I always turned my heat down at night, but now I don't. It's more efficient to maintain a constant temperature than to pump heat in the morning when it's the coldest. On the luxurious side, I have a large fireplace which has air flow behind the firebox and through pipes in the chimney out the front. I had glass doors made so I can actually use it. I close the doors when the fire burns down so the room heat doesn't go up the chimney. Unfortunately, recent ice storms took down large oak limbs and a couple trees. That means inexpensive heat for a few years, but I don't know if it'll offset the cost of the doors. There was great truth In Dances With Wolves when Ten Bears said "All that matters is a warm fire." I've been using a 10,000 BTU window air conditioner. It doesn't keep up on the hot days. It'll be interesting to see how the new 24,000 BTU pump does.
I love all the frugal tricks I get from watching videos like this. A few years ago the dryer broke. I knew it was going to take FOREVER for my landlord-roommate to replace it. So I got a drying rack and use my combo heater/fan to dry my clothes. They do last longer!
I live in the UK, we had central heating but we also turned off heating in rooms we weren't using. But this definitely explains heated toilet seats if your bathroom is cold!
in New England USA, I abandoned our furnace system to revert back to a high efficiency woodstove. The sleeping rooms and kitchen are about 10-15 degrees cooler than the communal rooms, in Fahrenheit. Of course, when in use the kitchen warms up nicely. It was very interesting to see the tea heating brazers and the modern device that heats under what looks like a table. I'm curious what the temperatures are in your area and if there is more insulation in the colder parts of Japan, or if the same tactic is used everywhere..
@@BETTALIFE101 gathering firewood is FAR FAR cheaper than burning oil, gas, or using electricity. I collected two trees last year from neighbors that had trees removed. The tree service gave the wood to me for free, I just needed to hand cut and split it. Time is the bigger factor than costs. Unless you are in a city, there is firewood EVERYWHERE. the towns tear down trees on the street and leave them for pickup, the state clears highways and if you ask nicely, they'll give you access to where they dispose of them. If you have the time, and unless you make a fortune per hour, it's about 1/5 the cost to heat with wood than pay the corporations for their fuel. If you don't have time, buying pre-cut and split seasoned wood costs about 1/2 the cost of heating fuel here, so even if you don't have the time, firewood is the cheaper and more renewable resource.
Tip that works very well: The ceilings in my home are almost four metres high and it is very cold. In the bedrooms I have a support from which I hang a small 6-watt toilet extractor fan, which collects the heat accumulated in the ceiling and takes it to the floor of the room through a tube. It is very efficient, silent and economical, because it moves the air and prevents the accumulation of heat in the ceiling.
SO interesting! I especially love seeing the traditional Japanese house. I'm living in Portugal now and though we don't get nearly as cold winters, it does get pretty chilly - especially when there is no central heating either. I now have 2 wall units (that heat and cool) and I do the same thing. I just heat the room I'm in. It feels so ridiculous to heat an entire house, when you (and your family) are only in a small part of it. Great video! 🙌🏽
I'm more curious how you don't have frozen water pipes. I live in Norther Wisconsin, current temp is -2C, the furnace runs 3 sections, basement loop(heats basement) bedrooms(does the 4 bedrooms) and main(living, dining, kitchen and both bathrooms) I only turn on the main section to prevent pipes from freezing, which happens at 40F you'll start getting slush in the pipes. From there its a short trip to frozen pipes and then worse burst pipes. Bedroom temp currently is 0C, unpleasant to say the least, a down blanket and a fur blanket are required for sleeping in these temps. To expensive to heat the bedrooms since you have to heat all 4 of them, and there's only me.
@@corthirteenth94 My guess is slush happens if the indoor temp is set to 40F while it’s really cold outside, e.g. 0F. Some pipes could be in/near exterior walls, or in the unheated basement, or in/near the bedroom section that’s kept colder.
I live in the UK - my old neighbour didn't have central heating until a couple of years ago. He has two open fires and had a small gas heater that he carried into every room where he was. It was very very cold nonetheless, and he was constantly ill - they've now installed airsource heating in his house and he's much much healthier. I didn't know that there were still houses where there's no central heating, that was eye opening. In fact, another neighbour told me just yesterday that they don't have central heating either! Just a few fireplaces and electric heaters.
I grew up in various homes with a mix of heating styles, but eventually central heating for many years, which I thought was the most convenient, "set it & forget it." Eventually, I got my own house which had zone heating, and I wasn't too sure about living with it, until I realized I could finally keep my bedroom cold enough to fall asleep quickly and easily, while keeping my office warm enough to keep working from home, and I could make my spare room whatever temperature necessary for the day's activities. Warmer for some craft projects, colder for those projects where I tended to overheat (oddly enough, mostly while sewing, lol). But the most important thing was simply *having* heating, and I could remember some years in my childhood where we didn't have much of a budget for heating most of our rooms, and some mornings I'd wake up to frost on the insides of the windows in my bedroom...which was a little *too* cold, but may have been where I got my need to "sleep cold." Ironically, I moved back in with my parents a few years ago to help take care of them in their old age, in a house with central heating...and I am even now typing this out with the window wide open despite it being the night after Christmas, just so my bedroom can cool down so I can sleep...and yes, that's even with the heater vent completely blocked off. My bedroom is on the southwest corner of the house, and passive solar gain still heats up my bedroom even on the shortest, darkest days of the year!
That's not what central heating is, though? Central heating just means that the heat is supplied from a central source to radiators in all apartments. It does not mean that radiators in different rooms don't have individual controls on them. Yes, you will always have some amount of heat coming from the pipes connecting everything together. But the pipes by themselves are not an efficient heat exchange medium. With central heating, you can still control the temperature of each room individually by turning the flow to each radiator up or down.
@@Yutani_Crayvencentral heating can also be heated or cool air passed thru vents. That's what we use in the south (as well as gas heaters due to cheaper cost ) . We do not have radiators here
The bigger question is why don't they insulate their homes so that at least they would not have to heat much or waste so much money on kerosene and electricity? In the winter air tends to be drier so having a well insulated home makes it so it can dry out better in the winter and be dehumidified in the summer.
Modern Japanese homes are built now with better insulation and zonal or central inverter heat/cooling. He showed an older traditional home. Even traditional styled home built now have inverter heat/cooling whether central or zonal, but most are zonal.
Burning kerosene requires a lot of ventilation. The CO2 and very importantly the large amounts of moisture must be removed from the house. Insulation would be less beneficial than you may first assume.
@@brianreynolds3508 Unfortunately no, new homes are not built much better than this. Code requires almost nothing different than it has for the past 25 years. Almost no homes are built with central systems (perhaps 10% at best). You can definitely have a home built with one, but it is extremely rare. If any house has "zonal" heating/cooling, it is essentially announcing that it is poorly insulated/wrapped. If a home is properly insulated and airtightness is at proper levels, then the whole building should have a fairly homogenised temperature.
We don't have real winters but in Portugal we also don't have central heating. Some people have fireplaces, others might have some sort of a radiator depending on where you live, but most of the times, winters can be uncomfortable. Sometimes being outside is warmer than staying inside. Mold is a big issue no matter if the house is old or new. Because of that, we have to additionally buy electric radiators and dehumidifiers. Luckily winters are quite short.
@@ssaunders1122 I did notice that. But still wouldn't want to dice with CO gas. Can happen in tents also, where you'd expect gases would diffuse through fabric even w/o ventilation holes
@@daffyduk77 a tent is a whole lot smaller of a space. And they have been doing this for generations just fine. Totally different environments and circumstances.
Having lived in a small village in the UK with no mains gas, we had a coal burning stove installed. It would take a while for the lounge to warm up. You get used to it being cold first thing in the morning ; it’s not the end of the world. You just get dressed in warm clothing very quickly! You can keep the stove going overnight by banking up the coal and then it doesn’t take too long to restart the fire in the morning. Central heating can make rooms feel very stuffy and overheated.
Although I like modern houses with central floor heating, I have fond memories of my grandma lighting the coal stove in the morning. I remember being tucked in a thick feather blanket as my grandma lighted the fire in a stove in a cold room in the winter. Yeah, and the toilet was outside the building, what a treat to go outside to -15 celsius lol
I imagine having a house that's full of hot water pipes but living in an earthquake prone country may also be a contributing factor to a lack of central heating.
Electric underfloor heating might be a good solution. In the UK in recent years, heated clothes airers are used as background / ambient heating - or the only heating, in increasingly mild winters - because utility bills are so high. These are cheaper and much kinder to clothes than a tumble dryer, they are warm but never hot to the touch, they fold flat to store, they’re extremely lightweight and portable and they cost pennies to run. They don’t give off water like kerosene stoves do. And of course you can use them for their intended purpose. (They’re also great for putting wet shoes near, because it’s a gentle heat.)
I see Japanese man giving me a tour of his parent's traditional japanese home, I leave a like and subscribe. thank you for having us as virtual guests friend. I look forward to watching more of your content in the future.
What do you think about winter life in Japan without central heating?? Thank you for watching ✌︎('ω'✌︎ )
I definitely can't! Especially in Hokkaido!
@@darthlaurel He said Hokkaido was a place that did have central heating. 2:24
@darthlaurel As far as I searched, 80% of houses in Hokkaido introduce central heating😉 But, besides there, I've never seen it😂 Thank you for watching!
@josephbrowning4220 Thank you for watching and paying attention to the details😘
This defies imagination. There are areas around the world that are 10x poorer but they heat the entire house. Here in Easter Europe even the poorest of people heat their homes even in spring and autumn. The table with heaters underneath looks like something somebody in a 3rd world country would use. It's insane at the level of civilization, wealth and technology Japan is.
This video randomly popped up in my recommendations on a cold January day in rural England, fascinating insight into a different culture’s experience of the war on chilblains, instant subscribe
Me too in Scotland 🤗
As a Canadian living out on the Prairies, I can't imagine a home without thick insulation, draft protection and centralized natural gas heating. Our winters are as brutal as anything in Siberia Russia.
Yes! Funny as he was talking I was thinking of Yakutsk!
How much insulation do you have?
It helps to remember Japan spans the distance from Key West, Florida in the south to Montreal, Quebec in the north, so there's lot of regional variations. He mentioned one that region does regularly use central heating, Hokkaido, the northernmost island. Which makes sense as it has a similar climate to eastern Canada.
@@zumurudlilit14 cm (5.5 inch) glass batt insulation inside and 100 cm (4 inch rigid open weave glass insulation under siding and 4 inch rigid Styrofoam insulation around foundation and under basement floor slab. That R60 for roof, R28 upper walls, R28 foundation basement walls and R40 for basement floor. My Canadian home is less than 30 years old and meets Canadian R2000 building envelope code. All interior walls have a heavy gauge polyethylene vapor barrier (including all electrical wall out let housings) and exterior insulation is protected by metalized Tyvek. Furnace employs a fresh air heat exchanger to recover waste heat while heating up fresh air and built in humidifier because our winters are nose bleed dry
@@Ecapsora Sapporo is like Windsor for climate, which s about as warm as it gets for eastern Canada.
If our house wasn't heated in the winter, we would be at risk of the pipes of our plumbing freezing and getting damaged, even bursting.
That's why they will use central heating in Hokkaido.
Millions of people in Hokkaido do not have central heating.
This is pipes issue, in my country we just isolate pipes cause we have harsh winter. No risk of bursting, in countries with warm winter, their pipes are not protected and can burst.
I live in japan and even though we get snow there are many ways to prevent freezing pipes. We have relief valves that will open when water freezes to prevent to much pressure. also we have a gas/electric hybrid tankless water heater. and during the winter as long as you have power it will keep the pipes warm enough to prevent freezing. plus in newer homes all of the rooms have aircons, so you just warm the room you are using instead of the entire home.
And plants
I have a dozen houseplants. They'd die with no heating 24/7.
What a beautiful house.
I live in a very old house here in the USA that is heated by steam radiators that are controlled in each room by turning a steam valve. Despite how old steam heating technology is, I find it a pleasant way to heat a house during cold months.
it is. but i think the main reason is like many cultures ego fights change. it is not the japanese way. ironic in a country where some technology is taken up, building is on of tho trades, extremely stupidly stuck in old styles.
Radiators crank
I remember I used to have to open the windows some times because it would get so hot
@@paprika7577 surely a reason to have a temperature sensor to control flow.
Great video and explanation, thank you! As an American who has spent months in Japan during cold months, I can easily admit how difficult it can be for westerners to adapt to.
It's not just a matter of convenience. In thick-walled well-insulated homes, it's actually less inefficient to heat the whole house to a low level than to not heat at all and then boost heat as you move from room to room (which means heating up the cold walls). And in some climates you have to heat because you will get mold if you heat some rooms and leave others totally unheated (hot air holds more moisture and then when it leaks into a room with cold walls, or you breath in the cold bedroom overnight, the moisture it condenses on the walls). In Germany the rental contracts specify that you have to heat to a certain minimum temperature and if you don't and you get mold, you are liable for the very high costs of treating it.
That’s quite interesting. In UK we need something like that cause it’s such a hotly contested thing with mould and whether it’s landlord or tenants fault.
Key word is well insulated. A lot of places are not. When there was a really bad cold snap here, a lot of people died, especially the elderly, because of no insulation and heating
I suppose in some really cold climates you might have to worry about mold but I think most places that don't get extremely cold (well below zero) don't have to worry about mold.
I live in the Netherlands and the last few decades temperatures have rarely dropped below -5 °C for any length of time, but there are definetely homes, mainly homes with poor insulation or poor ventilation, that have a mold-problem. I have seen some very bad ones.
@@BoguardisReally not true. Any high humidity climate is at high risk for mold damage. Cold only enhances your ability to create those more humid conditions in an otherwise drier climate.
This is a great video. Thank you for putting it out. My wife and I just bought our first home (in Chiba Prefecture) and it is newly built. We were excited when we bought it because it actually has double-paned windows, which are still rare in Japan. However, we were very disappointed in the summer with how hot the walls got and likewise, as winter has come on, by how cold our house gets. It is significantly colder than our old apartment, even though that place had single pane windows.
As the video points out, there are a lot of reasons why Japanese homes don't have central heating/cooling. But I would also like to point out some additional reasons, and particularly why Japanese homes are very poorly insulated.
1) The biggest reason Japanese homes are poorly insulated is simple: the building codes don't require good insulation. The home construction industry in Japan is very corporatized, much more so than in the US or other countries. In the US, it is much more common for private individuals to be involved in designing, hiring contractors, and even participating in the construction or renovation of their homes. This is pretty much non-existent in Japan. Home builders are very large companies with pretty rigid sets of home styles and designs and much of the construction work takes place in factories, with on-site assembly. Japanese building codes don't require any heating or cooling systems to be built into homes. Basically, the home purchasers are responsible for buying the A/C systems (which as heat pumps also function as heating units) and having them installed. Basically, heating and cooling systems in Japan are treated like any other type of home electronics/appliances. Home builders don't pay for the heating/cooling systems, and they don't pay for the energy needed to run them. Therefore, they don't care if homes are poorly insulted and have high heating costs. Every amount of non-mandated insulation basically increases their construction costs.
2) Japanese people don't know any better. This is touched upon in the video, but basically, Japanese people have always lived in homes that are crazy hot in the summer, and crazy cold in the winter. They are used to it, and while it's not comfortable, they just view it as the way things are. Japanese culture has a particular aspect that reinforces this way of thinking: 'gaman.' To 'gaman' means to endure, and Japanese people are taught from the time they are young that life is hard and you need to just 'gaman', or grin and bear it without complaining. While this is probably overall a good way of approaching life, it also means that problems that make life difficult in Japan don't get as much attention as they do in other countries. Basically, Japanese gaman culture means that problems often don't get resolved as quickly as they would in other countries, where people tend to complain when things don't run smooth.
3) Japan's architectural/culture focus on ventilation. The specific heating strategies used by Japanese homes in the past (fires/stoves, and in recent decades kerosine heaters) have necessitated basically constant ventilation to prevent death from smoke and carbon monoxide poisoning. Furthermore, Japan's summers are crazy hot and humid, which leads to constant growth of mold, particularly in shower and bathroom areas. Ever further, Japanese homes are quite small, and in the past have had large numbers of people living in them (not so much any more), but this has put an emphasis on constant ventilation to keep healthy air flow. In the US and in Europe, all of these issues are managed completely differently. Homes tend to be well sealed, heating doesn't put smoke or carbon monoxide into the air, humidity is much lower, and the homes are bigger. Therefore, modern homes in the West tend to be completely air tight, and ventilation systems work on carefully exchanging air slowly while incorporating heat exchange to prevent energy loss.
The point here is that, it can seem rather pointless to Japanese people to have really thick walls and good insulation when they're going to constantly want to have windows open or ventilation systems constantly swapping air with the outside.
Should have just made a video. That's a lot to read after just watching a video why. We already know why. Thats enough about this subject for today
Hey shemlawlor, I appreciated you taking the time to type out that comment. I absorbed additional context from it adjacent to the video. Thanks so much!
That’s interesting, I had no idea!
Basicaly what you are saying is that Japaniese people don't know what chimney is and how its works and maybe this explain why they don't have even something like Korean Ondol floor heating. I have seen some exuses about how Japan is highly earthquake zone and that is why thy don't have widespread piping heating systems and stuff, but that's just don't make any sense for more simple heating solutions.
It sounds to me like gaman (accept and go along to get along) why Japan with a much older culture stagnated while the barbarians of Europe kept progressing.
I remember reading about a traveller who had a tent inside their Japanese's home to keep himself warm during a night
That is what I do, in my 6,000 sq foot house.
I'm from the USA and I live in a 200+ year old house. We can't afford a new furnace for 10k so we use space heaters and our wood burning stove. We have rooms we don't use and we don't heat them. This is ok because there's no pipes running through these areas. However one day recently the temperature was -20F and the temperature inside the house dropped to 39F so our pipes froze and we had no water for a few days. This is a hazard of not heating your home properly. Also we need to heat constantly or it's not possible to warm it up to a reasonable temperature within several hours because it's just too cold in winter here where I live. We have to pay $500-$600 for the electricity to heat our home. On the plus side, we have 4 bedrooms and 5 acres of land. There's about 4 rooms in our house we don't need to use too. If you have central heating, you can still turn off the vents to unused rooms and you will not have to heat them or only heat them as needed. I have known a lot of people here in the US that do this to save on heating costs.
On really cold days I have definitely thought about sleeping in a tent with a heater, lol. The winter can be brutal.
@@romancetips365 I love the idea of indoor tenting. Even if it's not a real "tent," plastic sheeting (drop cloths, etc.) could be strung on removable hooks and a clothesline from one wall to another up close to the ceiling, to partition off a section that you spend most of your time in. This method can be reconfigured for convenience for space, to make a small room to accommodate the dog, kids, a work station, a cozy cot, or what have you. A space heater inside this area would be all you need. Nice tents aren't that expensive, either, and they make the popup version which allows for quick setup and quick take down. Great for visiting grand kids so they can have their own private space within the house.
@@romancetips365my old house was 100 yrs old and had like 3 of those wall mounted gas heaters (one mounted in the fireplace) to warm the house, was quite nice as long as rooms had the door open, we had a space heater in the bathrooms for when we needed to be in there for more than 30 , minutes
Thank you Mr. Noa. I have visited Tokyo a few times and was in a building with apartments. Since I was out the whole day, I just used the bathroom heater and air conditioner in the room for a short time while getting to bed. I don't have a problem with temperature and it was not that cold that I couldn't stand it. It was February.
Thank you for this video, I love it. Japan is a great country and people are wonderful.
Best regards from Serbia. Cheers.
Very well made. Very interesting explanation and demonstrations.
Love the looks of the traditional houses but I couldn't live without central heating!
At almost 88 I need more heat because my circulation is slower AND with back problems I am less active
@@JoyceMiller-w3o I'm 68, and my arthritic knees would not cope well with cold rooms. I think I'd wind up spending all my time with my legs under the _kotatsu._
I've been renting for over 40 years now and for the first time I'm renting somewhere with central heating rather than just a fireplace in the front room [this is in UK and Ireland]. It even has double glazing which is another first for me. Last place the windows often didn't fit into the frames, there were vents in every room to the outside - great in summer, not so much in winter - and we had a couple of oil fired radiators to keep us warm, our landladies cottage was no better with just an open fire in the main room to heat the whole place. Pipes would freeze in winter so we always kept lots of bottled water on hand and the curtains would freeze to the windows when it got close to freezing.
Now I'm renting a mobile home and it has double glazing, central heating and is often so warm my daughter - like today when it is definitely nippy outside - is just wearing a t-shirt indoors. I'll happily admit I don't miss the curtains frozen to the windows or the lack of running water when it gets too cold outside and central heating is good as long as you can keep the temperatures down - I know lots of boilers where the minimum you can set them to is around 70degF/20degC and the houses feel like hothouses when you go inside, couldn't survive in that heat.
@@MayYourGodGoWithYou just FYI 70F is cold. My house is set to 76F all year round. Even in Michigan where I'm from, most people set their house at 71F-72F and I always thought that was cold growing up. Here in Florida we have our house set to 76F. 70F is pretty chilly. I would start to shiver at that temp after about an hour. Maybe you're just used to being super cold all year long where you live.
Yes you could. In most parts of Japan the winters are not that cold: conversely, the summers are brutally hot, and if you lived 100 years ago you would have come to appreciate the way Japanese houses are designed to facilitate cool breezes, Nowadays, fortunately, all Japanese houses and apartments have air-conditioners, or, as we sensibly call them, "room coolers." You can get used to anything.
your parents house is so beautiful! i love traditional Japanese architecture
Beautiful yes, but not very liveable
I have a book that details how traditional Japanese joinery is done. The concept involves creating complex connections between structural elements that use no fasteners and rely on how various faces/tapers/etc fit together in such a way as to require no nails or screws yet can be disassembled by removing a small piece of the “joinery puzzle”, allowing future replacement of rotten or damaged timbers without damaging the other components of a joint.
It is an absolute masterpiece how this works and the number of different solutions to this puzzle number in the hundreds.
@@kristingallo2158idk seems like they are living there just fine, it's just not livable for you. I am not bothered by the cold as I run very hot so I would do pretty well in a house like this. Even with the central heating off in my house it's still too hot in winter
@@kristingallo2158 If it wasn't livable the Japanese wouldn't have continued to use it for hundreds of years lol.
@Name_Nah00 literally shows a large number of deaths in his own newspaper.
I'm from Australia and was struck by how many (unexpected) parallels there are to Australia. Many of the things you mentioned - humidity requiring ventilation, poor insulation and thin walls in older houses, no long tradition of central heating in homes, and people using smaller portable heaters (careful to turn them off when not in use!) - these are very familiar in Australia as well.
Even though some parts of Australia do not experience strong winters, in the south-east of the country winters can be colder than newcomers expect. It's a common complaint from North American and European visitors that they had never felt so cold in their home country as they were living in an Australian house during winter!
I realise the cultural and historical contexts are different between Japan and Australia, but it's an intriguing comparison nonetheless.
This is so true. Im from the UK and visited Sydney in July. I was surprised by how much colder I felt and just how different structurally your houses are.
I grew up in Australia in Victoria, and I remember well how cold our house became during winter due to the lack of insulation. We had an oil heater (later gas) in the lounge room, but otherwise to keep bedrooms warm we used portable heaters. Of course, during summer we had the opposite problem: we didn’t have A/C anywhere in the house, only portable fans to keep cool by, so summer days and nights could be quite uncomfortable.
I grew up in Victoria and moved to Sydney after uni. I was quite surprised at how often houses in NSW don't have central heating. In Melbourne, it's very much needed.
Norway is split in this aspect as electric space heaters are the most popular and many houses lack central heating, but others have radiators or in floor water heating. Apartment blocks are required to connect to district heating if nearby, however heat pumps supply heat at a lower price and some have switched over. Heat pumps are becoming common in houses as well. For supplemental heat most houses have a wood stove.
Beautiful home. Thanks for sharing.
There were only a couple of places where I wasn't quite sure what you were saying but common sense and content got me through that. Thank you for the explanation of your homes. I live in the northeast area of the US and I don't have much money. About a half hour before I go to bed I turn on a heating pad up where my shoulders and neck will be and when I slide under the covers I put an old fashioned rubber hot water bottle down by my feet. Roasty toasty!!
Thank you for sharing the inside of a typical Japanese home.
Does your neck become stiff and painful when it gets cold?
Hey man, thanks for going into such granular detail. Your vocabulary is excellent.
I froze in my 3DK in Fukuoka. I had one kerosene heater and one kotatsu. Winter was brutal and once I took my hot bath and jumped onto my futon and under the quilts , I did not budge.
not sure if it is legal in japan but if it is you should look into getting a diesel heater (which can also use kerosene). project farm reviewed some recently. the only issue is that you have to route 2 pipes to the outside (1 intake pipe and 1 very hot exhaust pipe that can cause a fire if not properly handled) by either creating holes in the wall or temporarily sacrificing a window and making a custom solution to fill the gap.
That expains the kotatsu meme that it's a trap...
[ _insert Tensura Milim kotatsu gif_ ]
@@kiyoponnn sigh, diesel is kerosene with a road tax added. jet fuel is also kerosene with anti-freezing agents added. he has a diesel heater already.
@@jmwintennkerosene is a separate fractional distillate of crude oil than diesel, with a lower boiling point, this is trivial to look up
Fukuoka doesn't even get very cold, get a better built place and an aircon.
I understand a lot of this, but with central heating you can also have different zones so you aren't heating rooms that aren't being used.
Thank you for watching and telling me about that😉 The places I've lived in England were student accommodations and flats so It seemed they could heat the entire building only😂
Haha. Yea. Most homes will have thermostats in different rooms for different zones. Usually at least 1 per floor and you can have one for every room if you want to pay enough. @@JapanwithNao
@@JapanwithNao there is such a thing as centralized heating for block buildings, since these are managed on a budget like the dorms you mentioned, or office buildings, but in most flats and houses you have full control over your heaters. using air conditioners for heating is also becoming popular
One more point: just because you live in a modern building, it does not mean it is big enough to contain any unused rooms. Overlarge houses are almost impossible to sell in my area and small, compact houses get all the attention of buyers.
@@JapanwithNao I own a wooden house with central underfloor heating, seperated into 10 circuits per floor, all of them are temperature controlled. 24 cm of cellulose insulation in the walls keep the heat inside, although nowadays you would probably opt for 36cm. Technically, you coud make the inside with paper walls and all.
Thank you! I watch many Japanese channels on TH-cam and have wondered why the homes are always so cold in winter. Even apartments in the cities seem to be cold.
yesterday there was a yakutia video about heating, now japan.
both very pleasant hosts.
thank you.
Greetings from Finland. I could talk about this topic literally for months as I got degree in building and also years of energy engineering studies.
I do not know where even to begin with this comment so I guess I will try to write about a couple of different things in as short way as I can.
Finland is rather cold country with moisture absolutely everywhere as about 10% of surface area is covered by lakes, not to mention smaller bodies of water and 15-20% of the area covered by swamps. It is so cold here that you need practically constant heating for +6 months just to prevent everything freezing solid and this brings big problems with moisture management.
Hundreds of years old design of Finnish log house would probably work there well like it did in many places such as USA and Canada where many immigrated to back in the day, it worked so well that others copied the design too. I do not know enough about the architecture and old architecture specially in northern Japan to compare and speculate why what things happened there.
I bet you could buy a ready made building packet here in Finland, ship it there and install it and have it work there just fine, it might be bit overbuilt and over insulated for your climate if it is design for permanent residency. There's also many different styles and types ofc from wooden buildings to half masonry, concrete and different styles of log buildings. Queen of England bought and installed Finnish log cabin package to Scotland if I remember right.
If you'd be heating the building with heat pump (ground source, air, or even water) you would likely be able to hold steady internal temperature in Finnish design building without spending any extra money on heating. Cooling in summer would be more effective too as way less heat would leak in.
Most of buildings here are heated with District heating system where from power plant, they circulate hot (depending on season 65-115C) water that is mostly heated with waste heat from the power plant that would otherwise be dumped to body of water next to the plant or to air. This way power plant that would produce electricity with about 40-60% efficiency (depends on design of the plant) they can get to 75-85% efficiency instead. Rest of the energy goes up the chimney (That gas needs to be hot enough or corrosion problems) and running the power plant itself.
I tried to be concise and not bring up too many different things while at it to not just list bunch of stuff, slight expansions added though for important side notions.
If anyone would want me to expand on something or something else related, ask away.
The district heating sounds a bit like China. They use district heating in the northern cities sourced from burning coal (south China has no heat provided by the government). And you have zero control over it, they usually turn it on in mid November and sometimes that is too late.
@@Eli-s7d Communist systems are a whole different beast and I would guess they just copied that from the Russians.
Here we are circulating the district heating system through out the year for multiple reasons. It's better value to sell heat to customers than to dump it as waste heat to environment. Also it is nice to have consistently hot water through the year without issues at home. Big thing with Finland too is that there aren't many days in a year when no heating of the buildings is needed, even the summer temperatures are quite low here on average.
If we didn't have this district heating system here, those buildings would need to be heated by some other way and those power plants would be releasing almost the same amount of heat to environment instead of selling it to customers while producing electricity. At 2012 46% of the heating energy in Finland was produces with district heating, most of that just a byproduct of electricity production. CHP (Combined Heat and Power) is the name of those power plants. Most owned by private companies and think only one energy company is majority owned by the state.
Some villages also have central district heating system where there is a power plant that just produces heat for district heating system for that village. Some towns or villages have a paper mill(s) there that produce a lot of waste heat so they get almost free district heating from those.
@@justskip4595 If you happen to write an article on all this I would be fascinated! please do, and let us know where to find it.
We are moving from South Africa (nothing is insulated, everything is concrete, brick or even stone) to Norway (waves hello to new neighbour in Finland) I have a bit of a habit of building things, even though it's not my job, so alllll the geekery is welcome!
A Finnish house and it's heating system is perfect for Finland, but would not survive in Japan because of the earthquakes.
I'm in the same boat and am used to EU energy standards. It is infuriating here when a home builder is proud to have walls of 1.0W/m2K...actually bragging about this. I threw Gutex on an old house, wrapped it and calculated it now at about 0.12W/m2K...still not amazing, but better than the 1.5 I started with.
I grew up in a country where most people had well insulated homes and central heating, but my family moved constantly and usually lived in trailors or small homes without insulation. We had a kerosene heater that we would always have in whatever was acting as the family room where we lived (usually the living room, but sometimes my siblings room because there was only one bedroom so the living room was our room). It made it so that in colder months, the whole family would gather in the one room to watch tv or listen to the radio, read, study, or even take a nap. Sometimes on very cold nights my father would stay up to leave it on so my siblings or grandmother could sleep in the living room warmth.
As much as friends and community members would be shocked upon finding we didn't (and couldn't) rely on central heating, I never felt that it was so weird and I know it brought many good memories of being in that shared space with my family, while going to my friends homes we'd more often than not hide away in their bedrooms. My family is sadly not close today, with some large conflicts driving wedges between different members as adults, but I'm thankful for the memories I have around that kerosene heater, and even miss it now that I live in a small studio with central heating. At night I still like to turn if off, however, and just use a small standing heater. I think I grew too accustomed to living that way.
In my area, Michigan (USA) it’s not uncommon to have cold dry winter temps of -23c and summer temps of 36c with high humidity. Most all homes have central heating and cooling, but sometimes the costs can be high for summer use, so many times owners will buy those air conditioners that hang from the window and then put it in the living room, closing all the doors to other rooms in the home that they won’t frequent much. We also have basements in almost all houses so it’s usually slightly warmer there in the winter and cooler in the summer, although humidity can really high so it’s important to have a dehumidifier.
So interesting to see how different locales have different takes on keeping us comfortable in different weather
Also michigan here, having been to japan as well, japan doesn't get that cold.
Proper insulation is the trick for both situations to keep the cold/warmth...
Why are you speaking in Celsius instead of Fahrenheit?
Interesting, in Ireland, we oscillate between 0 and 20 degrees throughout the year with no humidity.
@@kenshinhimura9387So we can understand what the hell he mean lol
Very interesting content! Thank you so much for posting. I am frequently impressed with Japanese ingenuity!
Very interesting indeed. Watching this in shorts and a T-shirt. Yesterday it was -5 degrees Celsius outside and I am grateful we DO HAVE a central heating.😀
In the UK there are heated lightweight folding clothes airers/racks. They give out a gentle ambient heat (kind to clothes and safe for fingers) and they are very low-consumption. This is key because a utility bills are so high now. The UK has a “maritime” climate that’s more humid in winter than summer, but seldom extremely hot or cold, so these clothes airers are good for winter background heating or ambient heating. No “cold shock”, and although you still need to wear a sweater, the temperature is comfortable for face and hands. I think the element in these is similar to what is in newer lightweight overblankets / throw blankets, which people often keep in the living room now - like a kotatsu on the couch!
A lot of people keep these clothes dryers going as heaters all night, or all day if they are home. They weigh almost nothing, you can carry them one-handed, so they’re very very easy to position anywhere.
Hi from Finland and as I been to UK a lot I always amazed about the quality of the buildings or actually the lack of it. People live in damp, mold infested cold homes in the winter. It is amazing to me how they dont die of pneumonia. I spend most of my time in winter in my underwear or something very ligh. My home is 24C-25C year around.
@@teresalehtonen8499 Yep. And this habit of drying clothes indoors on racks without outside ventilation only adds to the moisture problem. But you have to realise how different the moisture problem that high humidity in winter is from the dry winters of Finland. The construction technology is TOTALLY different and applying cold climate construction methods to a temperate or "maritime" climate actually creates worse problems for the building. It's only relatively recently that proper heating, insulation and ventilation has been possible at relatively low budgets in these climates. Ventilation of moisture in winter is the problem.
@@teresalehtonen8499 yes, it’s crappier, and since the last 40nyears, with the commodification and coroporatisation of homes, it has been getting crappier.
@@teresalehtonen8499 Everything in the UK was privatised in the Thatcher years and afterwards. This included a massive stock of housing built at pub,ic expense. So Brits (especially in England) more for housing, electricity, gas, telecoms, postage, public transport and water & sewerage - and we get a much, much worse service. Do not let your nation’s “family silver” get stolen and then sold back to you dmaged, for higher prices.
@@teresalehtonen8499 Moisture management seems to be a real challenge for foreigners. To the point that a child of Africans died recently because of mould. It's a skill issue actually. Mould is rare for English people.
How do Fins deal with moisture levels and prevent mould?
Fascinating - thank you. I also grew up in a house without central heating in the UK in the '70s and '80s. The front room had a gas fire, and the bathroom had a wall mounted electric heater - and that was it. Interestingly, although it was a small 3 bed semi built before WW2 it had fireplaces in 2 of the bedrooms that were no longer used, so we'd managed to make the place colder than it was originally designed to be LOL. Couple that with single glazing in iron windows that buckled in the Winter and you could wake up to mini snow-drifts on the inside window sill of your bedroom!! Getting dressed under the covers for a 6am paper round, etc. Wow memories flooding back... #oldfart
Hi! Yes times have changed. I'm German born in the 60s and remember our house in winter like you said; one heated place (ours was the kitchen) and in the evening a minimal warmed living room for watching TV for 2 hours...
Ha! I lived in the UK in the 80s and remember turning on my heater winter mornings and holding my clothes in front of it to dry out from the dampness….from my bed bc it was too cold to get until my clothes were warm. You can see the steam of the damn clothes rising. Crazy!
I grew up in a 1900 house in Scotland it had 1970s central heating no insulation was not a warm house. Ice formed on the INSIDE of the bedroom windows over night
Yes I recall “Jack Frost” on the inside of the windows well. Looking at the patterns as they were amazing and absolutely freezing.
You had a heater in the bathroom? Luxury! :) 60s born Brit here, exactly the same childhood. The kitchen was warm at mealtimes, the living room had a gas fire, single glazing everywhere and… that was it. We had metal ‘flying saucers’ heated by a standard incandescent light bulb (something else that no longer exists) which would be put in the bed (heavy woolen blankets, no foreign ‘continental quilt’ nonsense) a half hour before bed time, then removed, to create a two foot pool of warmth under the freezing sheets. Frequently woke in the morning to thick ice on the windows, from the condensed water vapour of our breaths. And you tell kids that today, and will they believe you? ;)
Smile! Our current home in North Carolina (have lived in 10 houses in 50 years!) has a small powder room off the front door that gets very toasty, despite our efforts to control the heat flow there. I’ve taken to using it as a sort of large clothes dryer by doing the same technique with a wall-to-wall rod, as shown here, to hang up washed clothes….so totally convenient & energy efficient! Thanks for all your wonderful vids on Japan!! 💕
you probably have heat lamps for lighting in your powder room and don't even realize it. Most of them have hot lamps
@ actually - the 2 full baths do have heat and fan units in the ceiling - which my husband refuses to let me use because they are over 40 years old, potentially not safe anymore and would just be a pain to remove/replace. The powder room is definately just an exhaust fan set-up. Grew up in Chicago and this is the only house I’ve ever lived in that had heat/fan ceiling combos…might not be as common as you think!!
I live in the UK and have just realised I have a Japanese mindset when it comes to heating! Great video!
Yeah, you both have no gas.
@@ФеофанЭтополедолжнобытьзаполне Без газа может и плохо но японцы намного здоровее. Газ однажды закончится как и любые природные ресурсы. И вот те кто привык топить у себя до +30 зимой те вымрут, а те кто понимаю что природные ресурсы не бесконечные те давно адаптировались и будут жить.
@@apTimON ну понятно. Это все не про*бы правительства, это целенаправленная работа, проводимая осознанными усилиями всей нации в едином порыве с тем, чтобы подготовиться к моменту когда Солнце угаснет. Тогда-то японцы с англичанами и заживут!
outdated for sure.
When we only had access to small electric heaters this was how electricity was saved during winter.
One winter I ran a small fan heater in my garage as I was working from home, and the electrify usage from that one small fan heater (only used during work hours) was the same as our entire central heating for the whole house.
It is always more efficient and cost effective to manage drafts and heat the whole house (efficiently).
This is not limited to electric or gas heating.
I have a mate that lives down near Crookwell, he had a fireplace plumbed through his whole house so the heat from a small cooking stove heats an entire four bedroom house through our harsh winter.
You could easily apply this method to Japanese houses - even the traditional wooden ones. In fact the ample airflow would help in this case.
Had a friend that heated his entire house via electric radiators in the UK, his electric bill was tiny but he did know unscrupulous electricians. I seriously doubt it was good for his health either.
Please post more often, at least once per week 🙏 Subscribed to see more content
Thank you for watching! I'll do my best!
I live in central Japan surrounded by two sets of alps. My house is 22 years old and has a central air-conditioning heating system for the winter months. It also serves as a central cooling system for the long hot summers. My walls are well insulated and all windows are double-glazed. AFAIAA my house is the only one in my immediate neighborhood that is designed this way. We don't get too much snow in winter but at an elevation of 400 meters it does get pretty cold (average 7C to -4C). Summers are very humid (rarely below 75%) and average temperatures are between 31C and 20C.
Coldest is minus 4C 😮
@@bat-ireeduienkhbat7461 Average temperatures. In January it will sometimes touch minus 10C overnight. Much colder places in Japan and if you're living in rented accommodation you are going to feel very cold indoors.
How do you battle humidity, I wonder?
@YuriR.-si6wg I'm from Florida... if you find out, please let me know, too. 😂
"We don't get too much snow in winter"? The country with the most snowfall on average is literally Japan ;(
quite interesting as I am about to move to Maine, USA and am considering a large house. This video awoke me to the issue of living comfortably in a cold climate, which was something I took for granted in New York City in the smaller accommodations of an apartment. Also to appreciate the frugal mindset of the Japanese and how this is reinforced on a daily basis by the technology on which the society is based was quite interesting! Thanks for your effort!
I love Maine but you need to be aware when you buy. Is the house insulated is a big question. Can you shut off some rooms? How much oil did the previous people use, or how many cords of wood. Does it have new energy efficient windows and doors? What is the radon level. When was the septic last cleaned and how old is it. Is your drive easily plowable. Does the house already have a metal roof and vinyl siding. Some of these questions may not pertain to your house but buying here is "different". Good luck
Maine houses are going to be well insulated and have a huge furnace.
An outdoor wood boiler is crucial to live north of Bennington, VT. Especially coupled with floor heating and as a hot water source. They're extremely efficient, only need to be loaded once per day, and use an inexpensive locally available renewable resource.
I moved from a late 1970s condo in California to a late '80s apartment building in Chicago and the difference is so good it is difficult to convey sufficiently. The california place was drafty but not well ventilated, so summers were too warm, winters too cold, and heating too expensive. The Chicago place seals up tightly with the windows closed so even when it's 20F the heaters only run for a few minutes before switching off. In the summer, I open the windows and the cross-ventilation is good enough that I rarely need to run the A/C.
If I were to move to Maine, I'd ensure that the windows are all modern double-panes and the walls and ceiling are well insulated. Comfort is worth the cost, and your heating will be proportionally lower.
There is nothing frugal about wasting insane amounts of energy because you couldn't be bothered to build a house to fit the climate you're in
And by the way thank you for the video. Well done!
I really enjoyed this video. Thank you for making it. I also appreciate the effort you have put into speaking the English language so well especially as the grammar is so different to Japanese and many things don't make sense. Good job!
I watch the video from Germany and appreciate my underfloor heating with heat pump more and more. I've never had heating so cheaply compared to gas.
How are the floors heated by the heat pump? Is it hot water, hot air or electricity under the floor? In the US, heat pumps primarily just heat the air in the room, not under the floor. Under the floor sounds better, and would like to know how that works in Germany. Thanks.
@@BeDoHave-so8nr the heat pump heats water and pumps it around in the floors. I'm installing water based floor heating right now for my geothermal heat pump.
@@erik.... My uncle built a log home with in-floor heating, in the 70s. He felled the logs on his own land, cut them into half-rounds, and used them for the walls. Poured concrete slab with pipes embedded in the concrete. Uncle Roy was not an educated man, just super smart!
@@erik.... How do you cool during summer?
@@user-roadwander i dont, i live in Sweden. 😄 It is however possible to cool using the fluid that is pumped around down in the well, by connecting it to a convector cooler which gives you pretty much free cooling, except for the circulation pump and fan.
I grew up in Japan. I'm hafu. At my aunts and uncle's homes and my grandmother's house was a traditional wooden structure and we use kerosene stoves and kept a tea kettle on them to increase the humidity inside the house to keep it warm.
The house we lived in was a hybrid Japanese western style house. We had window air conditioners in a few of the rooms and had a big large kerosene heater right off the entrance that we use to keep warm. My mother kept several pots of water on top to help increase the humidity.
The one advantage of the kerosene stoves was you could make water for tea or cook things like mochi, fish and other things.
We wore layers of clothing and a sweater inside.
And this was common in the United States until the mid 1970s and '80s when central heating started becoming popular. Before that people had to do similar things, even the United States.
I miss family gatherings around the kotatsu.
A cousin of ours lived in a very old home and they had a deep open hearth or inori. There was a centerpiece that could be placed in there and it held 2 tatami to cover up the opening for non-winter use of the room.
One nasty old lady's remark: not "inori", "irori".
I lived in a my in-laws' house in good old windy Gunma. We had no air conditioning or central heating, only kerosene heaters and a kotatsu. I don't miss them very much, because
a, the kotatsu gave me the grandmother of all colds whenever I used it,
b, the room temperature was one-digit (Celsius) about an hour after I had switched off the heater (family slogan: "If the temperature is two-digit, you're fine"),
c, I regularly measured 2-5 degrees Celsius in our living-room and bedroom in the morning,
d, bedroom is in singular form because we could only afford to heat one, so our whole family of five (including three kids, and the youngest was 4 at the beginning of our stay) used my husband's old bedroom,
e, I often found ice in the kitchen on the window sill. Yes, inside, with everything shut properly,
f, and I used a lot of "F" words because of this one: my fingers swelled twice their normal size whenever I worked on my computer at night in the aforementioned 2-5 degrees, which happened very often (no thank you, Lehman Brothers and doing piecework for a little extra cash).
Buy my oh my, running against the strong winter wind made my kids the best runners of their school and gave them excellent lungs. One of them is still pursuing an active sport career and another sings in three different choirs.
Now we live in Europe and we have central heating, but we must heat carefully because of the skyrocketing gas prices. So right now I'm wearing my old hanten, which I bought in Gunma. I had to patch it up several times over the past years, but it still keeps me warm.
Thank you for this description! ^_^ There is a nostalgia to keeping warm without modern convenience. I remember it.
Central heating has been common in the US FAR before the 1970s.
I’m in Georgia right now with no central heating. We use space heaters and keep room doors closed at night to keep the heat in…Lots of warm blankets on the bed.
@kellymoses8566 I disagree all the houses I saw built before the mid-70s had either steam heat or a wall heater.
Steam is not central air or central heating.
Thank you for this video. We bought a kayabuki minka recently in Nara City and moved in at the end of last month, winterizing has been a learning experience. Once we get PR, we’re going to remodel and add central HVAC. Winter’s and summer’s extreme temperatures aren’t a reason to suffer while at home.
I didn't know you could put Public Relations in your house, or is it Puerto Rico, you mean?
@ hehe ya got me! But no, the PR I’m talking about is permanent residency 🙃
You aren't getting central HVAC in old houses like that unless your budget is in the ¥10,000,000 range. You can't simply run ducting around an old structure that was never made for it. You can get away with it to a certain degree with houses made in the last 30ish years, but even then, you aren't getting it everywhere.
I honestly don't mean this as a dig, but to save you a lot of money. Put everything you can into external insulation, a decent vapour barrier and a certain amount of airtightness. You can't completely wrap an older house since you will end of getting funky mould in places. Also make sure that the external membrane is brought in around the best quality windows that you can afford. Also don't forget to insulate the roofspace and floor. Please also confirm if you haven't already that you don't have a wood foundation......if you do, then say goodbye to your kids' college fund.
Insulation, insulation, insulation. No point at all of any kind of central system, when all that energy is going to leak right out.
@@NihonKaikan unless he's really lucky the best he can hope for foundation wise is that the wooden beams are in those little precast concrete stand offs.
not going to say it would be easy to run a central hvac(i'd just run mini splits with heat pumps), but they would have a fair shot running it underneath the floor. personally i hate floor vents,but to each their own.
This commentary applies to Greece as well. Old houses rarely have central heating! Great video!
Let's face it though, most of Greece is on the warm side 😉
Thank you for this informative video! I have a great respect for the people and traditions of Japan. My favorite bands are from Japan. I hope this winter is warmer for everyone.
Honestly i truly am thankful for channels like this, helps me bridge the global gap on things and understand how and why another culture does it in different ways.
Cheers and much love from Canada keep up the great content.
FWIW Japan is changing and there's little difference in design philosophy between modern Japanese homes and those in Canada.
Thank you for this very interesting video. I'm a 81 years old German. When I was a child, we did not have central heating. Only the kitchen was warm. If there was a bathroom, it was only heated once or twice in the week for bathing. It was different in big cities, where central heatings were more common.
Hi I'm living in Berlin now, an old Turkish lady told me they didn't have bathrooms when we moved here. I'm also interested in the tartarian buildings take over theory, what do you know /mean with "if there were bathrooms"??
Liebe grüße
I do not know about "tartarian buildings take over theory". What does that mean? I know about Tartarians.
@@pruost Till today, I prefer my sleeping room unheated. Last night it was -3 degrees Celsius outside the houes and 9.5 degrees in my sleeping room. I use typical German covers. The bed was cosy warm.
I also live in Germany and my mom told the exact thing about bathrooms. She said that there was only one bathroom and two toilets (one for the women the other for men), which were located in the attic btw, in the whole building. Every family that lived in the building was given a key for the toilets and bathroom. She said that she and her female neighbor who was also her friend would always go to the toilet together, because they found the attic creepy@@pruost
@DieterBickel West Germany or East?
There was a similar method in Spain called “mesa camilla” those tables were traditionally round an d had a round space underneath to put hot stones or similar and the table was covered in a big tablecloth that you woul use to cover your lap. Your feet and up to the height of the table were kept warm.
The mesa camilla is still very common in Andalusia. I have one!
Same in Portugal, besides a few old people that probably still have them it isn’t popular anymore.
Hello There Nao ,Hope you are well , Great video and very interesting and enjoyable to watch , your Home looks lovely , Thank you for sharing , Take care 👍👍
This reminds me of 'South From Granada' by Gerald Brenan, where he describes the traditional family seated around a table with charcoal heater below. Over the course of a few months, the 'normal loving relationships' somehow deteriorate. But there's no escape. The heated toilet seat sounds like a good option.
Ironically, my heat pump system was made in Japan
When I lived in Europe a lot of people used Japanese AC systems with inverter for heating.
Almost every Japanese aircon is built with reversal valves...but most Japanese people don't understand this and think kerosene is cheaper/more efficient. Logic? No thanks.
Mine too...
Not ironic at all considering the fact that our manufacturing is a shell of what it used to be. Luckily we have plenty of trees so I can heat my home with wood.
@@NihonKaikanelectricity is very expensive in Japan and heating takes quite a lot of electricity so yes, kerosene is technically cheaper for them
Its so true how things that don't make sense just become normal, in the UK a lot of houses still don't have mixer taps in the bathrooms or toilets. This was because it used to be seperate so needed a seperate tap but even though this isn't true anymore and hasn't been for decades, and kitchens usually have them, even new houses are built without them in bathrooms and toilets.
Central heating in Germany is different. We have individual heaters which are sourced by a central heating system. So we can raise the temp of the whole apt. or house to a moderate low temp to keep rooms from freezinh while heating individual rooms which are used frequently to a more comfortable temp. I live in a very small house with no central heating but with individual heating systems to save energy. But the central heating with individual heating units that have individual thermostats is the rule in German houses. Which can be quite energy efficient as well.
Could be earthquake preparedness a reason for not using a US style central heating? I know you should snuff out every flame in an earthquake warning. Which would not be possible in the old central heating US style.
Thank you for watching and sharing about the central heating in Germany😉 The earthquake could be another reason why we don't have it😃 But I didn't find the opinion😂
the reason is centuries old architecture and infrastructure that had no access to the kind of recourses the US does. updating would be abysmal cost and difficulty and it's not like there are enough recourses either.
Nah California has high earthquake risk and has central heat and air con.
Not an issue with earthquakes in California; we have gas furnaces, stoves, clothes dryers.
Germanys system only has heating. It’s missing the other 3 letters from HVAC, ventilation and air conditioning.
OK, you earned my subscription, bright, young man. The children and young adults are amazing today. It has to be the computers nowadays.
Thanks, very interesting. Greetings from Poland!
Hi - I’m from UK and grew up in a house without central heating until my teens in 1971. We used coal fired stoves with a back-boiler system on the kitchen stove for hot water, our bedrooms had gas fires. On cold winter mornings you woke up to find ice on the inside of your bedroom window.
I was interested to see a traditional Japanese irori in your video. One problem with these given the lightweight wood and paper-screen construction of traditional Japanese homes is that they easily set the entire house on fire if it collapsed during an earthquake. This happened on a large scale during the Great Kanto earthquake in 1923 which devastated Tokyo. Unfortunately it happened around midday when many families were using their charcoal hearths to cook meals, which led to enormous firestorms as many houses collapsed and ignited.
Enjoyed watching the communal game of Riichi mahjong at 3.54 around the Kotatsu heater. Nice Kokushi Musou (13 orphans ) hand !
How do they have paper walls, anyone can break into the house ?
And I never heard of anyone in the UK who died of Heat Shock taking a bath.
@@brankamici5164 The exterior of the home will still be made of sturdier wood and bamboo. Paper walls are used as interior doorways and room dividers.
@@brankamici5164 Internal walls
I grew up in Canada with no running water or central heating.
Interesting video! I have visited Japan several times in winter, but never really experienced this as hotels but also publicly accessible old houses like museums generally are well heated. Hotels actually often have the opposite problem: Centrally regulated A/C systems that are set to heating regardless of outside temperatures. From October to March, the A/C will be heating, not cooling. Even when it's well over 20 degrees outside (and even warmer inside). Last trip I stayed in Okayama in a hotel where it was 28 dgrees inside....and couldn't even open a window. Didn't get much sleep....
I stayed in Fukuoka in the months of April and May..it was a bit chilly in the mornings, but it was fine. I like a cool bedroom for sleeping. I handle cooler temperatures better than hot and humid, but I am Canadian. 🤷♀️
I hate humid weather so much. Not only does it make it feel hotter (even at lower temperature which isn't a huge deal I guess) but it also makes evaporative cooling impossible to do through sweating. So when you sweat it just traps even more heat.
I went to Florida for a couple weeks and almost died a couple times I think. I also got massively ill.
I burn really hot like few degrees above normal 👀
I love Summer and fall ....hunting season
But am.best suited for the cold
I would further argue that earthquakes are key aspect to this. Having to fix the pipes after every earthquake would be extremely expensive. Just like with the very lightweight traditional style of construction, which is also heavily accustomed to the shaky ground beneath.
Yup. Typhoons as well.
Plus with standards constantly being updated for new houses it becomes more ideal to have permanent fixtures such as a big central heating furnace and house construction to make it worth it.
@@kholdstare90
Expensive
It also contributes to the bad insulation. Door gaps were made deliberately large so that in case of an earthquake that deformed the frame, the smaller door can still be opened with ease.
Also kerosene is probably the only way you could get warm right after a huge one that would take off the grid and the gas.
@@staphzhang2718
Eco friendly ?
Also dangerous if you are running gas pipes large enough to handle central heating to every house.
Fascinating vid, thank you
Glad you enjoyed it! Thank you for watching!
I grew up in our countryside with cold floors and drafty rooms. It was believed at some point that fresh air is good to breathe, so it was let in from everywhere. It absolutely sucked because we used no heaters of any kind, just grin and bear it while too cold to do anything but stay under covers or go work outside. 😂
Hello slugbunny. When and where please . Thank you.
Interesting, also here in Italy we have high ceiling houses but we all have central eating system, or to be clear: we have different solutions. District heating from steam power plants that distribute the heating to the houses. Or methane network. In every flat we have our own boiler that powers the radiators and the hot water in the house. With the thermostat we regulate the temperature of the house also to save money
Or heat pumps and underfloor heating. So comfy... ❤
Thank you for watching and sharing yours😄 Ciao Ciao( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
In my grandparents house, they used a cast iron stove to cook and heat the basement, and we spent much of the time during winter down there (they got a central system later for the rest of the house) but I liked the stove - it was nice splitting the wood and setting it up to dry for use for next year, and the food cooked on it was great
Very impressive explanation ... and presentation too. Thank you.
Fascinating! Thank you for your perspective.
I lived in Japan for 22 years, 9 of those in Nagano, near Iiyama the snowiest area in mainland Japan. The cold was challenging. Involved a lot of building air barriers. Most rooms had double windows, except for one. That bedroom was always cold.
Being in construction I can guess that a central air system is just too much for the older houses and in the newer ones the walls are still much thinner than houses in western countries. Very little space left for plumbing etc. There's also the electric load. Most main panels go to 200A in North America for example. Where as in Japan a lot of homes still get by on 30A main breakers. Some have 40 or even up to 60, with the max usually being 100 for very demanding homes.
How did houses with piped water avoid freezing and breaking? Where I live, if the heat goes out for more than a day when the temperature is 0°F (-18°C) outside, there is a significant risk of water pipe damage.
Also the earthquakes are a significant problem.
This...100%. I got my panel upgraded to 100A 25 years ago and for this I had to be put on TEPCOs account as a "factory" at that time, with new cabling run from the pole. Don't you miss the days of turning on a toaster and someone else turns on the heater...whole house goes dark.
I wonder how they deal with the plumbing living like this. Hokkaido for instance has a climate similar to northern europe, not heating means pipes break all the time, you have to keep them above the frost barrier if filled! If you do not have central heating you probably have pipe damages every year. Do they simply live with it (btw. some Texans learned that the hard way a few years ago when they were hit by a blizzard)
@@werpu12 Hokkaido builds better than the main island and has for a long time. All cold climates have a drainback feature to get excess water out and avoid freezing. Modern homes are also built with enough insulation and are sealed tight 高気密高断熱 so it's never that cold inside. You can heat the whole house with an aircon or two.
Thanks for the eye opening video! I guess those houses are built more for the warmer months than the colder ones. But, it looks pretty unpleasant, especially if you can see your breath. I think there should be at least ONE warm and cozy room, or even a sauna.
When I was a child in Montana, USA, we all huddled around the single heat source playing games, wore warm clothing indoors and survived nicely.
No sense
No feeling.
Hahaha the choice of language describes it perfectly. "Surviving" versus living nicely.
ty for bringing me some interesting facts in my life, greetings from Germany!
Thanks for explaining all this about heating in Japan, the thought had crossed my mind in the past that rural places often looked like they got very cold in winter. It makes a lot of sense when taken in the Japanese culture and context which you so well explained.
I can see why subfloor heating is becoming more common in newer homes - once installed, it's cheaper, more efficient, and can be sectioned off by room.
I don't like warm feet. It is not natural.
Of course I do not like cold feet either, the best is if I do not feel if my feet are warm or cold, meaning I am somehow between my own limits.
@@duudsuufd You can set underfloor heating to whatever Goldilocks temperature you desire.
@@DiscoFang But if the floor is not very warm, the air above it will be not warm either.
@@duudsuufd My uncle has it in his house and I'm not the biggest fan of it. It's more efficient and probably the future, but it takes a long time to heat up a room if it's cold in there.
If it fails electrically under tile you are doomed though. Better to do with pipes
What about the mould? If you have high humidity and no heating, would your house get mouldy all around, on walls and behind furniture?
high humidity in summer
Somehow, from winter to spring, Japan is dry, so we actually use a humidifier😂
Thank you for watching😊
Indeed, 14 degrees Celsius is considered a minimum temperature in North-western Europe conditions to prevent mould growth. In humid conditions there is also risk of asthma and other respiratory diseases. As a child we had one oil stove in the living room and ice on the bedroom windows. But the school classes were full with “green double-snot river” faced kids.
Central heating can be much more cost effcient than even just one space heater. That is why Europe has wide spread central heating.
cost efficient yes, but not very warm to remain cost efficient :) gas convectors and tile stoves are the cheapest and warmest solution in a well insulated brick house, but not always an option.
@@solarydaysWhat century do you live in. 😂 With water to water heat pump and underfloor heating the house stays at 22°C year round and doesn't cost more than 50€ in the coldest months.
Space heaters use electric heating which is 100% efficient. If you're not effectively heating a home with space heaters it's because of the setup, not the technology.
In the US it's often cheaper to heat with gas than electricity. I'm not sure if some people talking about efficiency are really talking about cost.
@@Boguardis Heat pumps are up to 400% efficient. And with underfloor heating less heat is needed to reach comfortable room temperature.
Hello from England! I love learning about Asian cultures! Thanks so much for sharing! P.S. I love your accent :)
This brings back memories. I used to teach middle school, and in the winter everyone wore multiple layers under their uniforms and work clothes, often supplemented with kairo body warming packs. I had silk thermal-wear I brought from my home country under my suit for self-preservation. The only place I remember being warm was the teacher's room. I think some schools brought in portable heaters to the classroom but I don't recall if any of 5 I worked at did. One of my apartments had no heating unit, so I had a cylindrical white kerosene heater just like the one in the video. I always shut it down at night, since I was concerned about CO poisoning - nights were very cold.
No central heating & even drying cloth indoor heater, should lead to strong condensations, specially all windows, damp wood inside, smell & damaging all wooden things inside?
Likely the dwelling is so drafty it doesn't matter.
@user-vp5iy8ec9q That's a good point! More like Tatami got damaged especially when they are newly introduced in the house! I think pillars are fine...😂 Thank you for watching!
I recently bought space heaters because my central heating has a mind of its own when it wants to work. Just the small space heaters have doubled our electricity usage.
Which explains to me why kerosene stove heaters in Japan with the rising electricity prices. But I’m terrified of fires from those.
Not just fires but indoor air pollution as well. Unburnt hydrocarbons, VOCs, CO and CO2. Never burn fuels in enclosed spaces without adequate exhaust or ventilation!
I suggest retrofitting your place if possible with a pellet heater or wood stove.
@@corthirteenth94 Kerosene is a very clean burning fule. Just get a co2 and co detector and keep them near the unit, you will see it reaches equilibrium even in very non-leaky homes at safe levels
I’m very surprised how similar this is to my family’s lifestyle in Ohio. Our home is well insulated, yes, but only has a 37 square meter footprint and is heated entirely by one portable radiator. We do not have the option to turn our heater off in the winter however, because our harsh winters will cause our pipes to freeze and burst, flooding our homes. The worst winter days here can reach -30 degrees Celsius, but most of the winter hovers around 0 degrees.
I love the idea of a kotatsu though. This seems like a very cozy and efficient way stay warm and bring the family together. We might try to make one ourselves! 😊
Research this well before you do, so that you don't create a fire hazard. I would research the pros and the cons as well as find out how many burns were caused by kotatsu, if this info is even findable.
@ That’s exactly what my wife and I discussed. We decided to use a heat source that pipes into the enclosure rather than a source within the enclosure for that very reason. Good looking out though.
I just had an inverter mini-split heat pump installed. It heats my whole house! I was heating with baseboard electric heaters, which are now backup and for extreme cold. I feel grateful. I always turned my heat down at night, but now I don't. It's more efficient to maintain a constant temperature than to pump heat in the morning when it's the coldest.
On the luxurious side, I have a large fireplace which has air flow behind the firebox and through pipes in the chimney out the front. I had glass doors made so I can actually use it. I close the doors when the fire burns down so the room heat doesn't go up the chimney. Unfortunately, recent ice storms took down large oak limbs and a couple trees. That means inexpensive heat for a few years, but I don't know if it'll offset the cost of the doors.
There was great truth In Dances With Wolves when Ten Bears said "All that matters is a warm fire."
I've been using a 10,000 BTU window air conditioner. It doesn't keep up on the hot days. It'll be interesting to see how the new 24,000 BTU pump does.
I love all the frugal tricks I get from watching videos like this.
A few years ago the dryer broke. I knew it was going to take FOREVER for my landlord-roommate to replace it. So I got a drying rack and use my combo heater/fan to dry my clothes. They do last longer!
I want to go get a sweater just watching this!
I live in the UK, we had central heating but we also turned off heating in rooms we weren't using. But this definitely explains heated toilet seats if your bathroom is cold!
in New England USA, I abandoned our furnace system to revert back to a high efficiency woodstove. The sleeping rooms and kitchen are about 10-15 degrees cooler than the communal rooms, in Fahrenheit. Of course, when in use the kitchen warms up nicely. It was very interesting to see the tea heating brazers and the modern device that heats under what looks like a table. I'm curious what the temperatures are in your area and if there is more insulation in the colder parts of Japan, or if the same tactic is used everywhere..
He mentioned that there was central heating in Hokkaido. That's the northernmost home island so I'd expect it to be colder.
Sure if you have land and money to keep gathering firewood.
@@BETTALIFE101 gathering firewood is FAR FAR cheaper than burning oil, gas, or using electricity. I collected two trees last year from neighbors that had trees removed. The tree service gave the wood to me for free, I just needed to hand cut and split it. Time is the bigger factor than costs. Unless you are in a city, there is firewood EVERYWHERE. the towns tear down trees on the street and leave them for pickup, the state clears highways and if you ask nicely, they'll give you access to where they dispose of them. If you have the time, and unless you make a fortune per hour, it's about 1/5 the cost to heat with wood than pay the corporations for their fuel.
If you don't have time, buying pre-cut and split seasoned wood costs about 1/2 the cost of heating fuel here, so even if you don't have the time, firewood is the cheaper and more renewable resource.
Tip that works very well: The ceilings in my home are almost four metres high and it is very cold. In the bedrooms I have a support from which I hang a small 6-watt toilet extractor fan, which collects the heat accumulated in the ceiling and takes it to the floor of the room through a tube. It is very efficient, silent and economical, because it moves the air and prevents the accumulation of heat in the ceiling.
SO interesting! I especially love seeing the traditional Japanese house. I'm living in Portugal now and though we don't get nearly as cold winters, it does get pretty chilly - especially when there is no central heating either. I now have 2 wall units (that heat and cool) and I do the same thing. I just heat the room I'm in. It feels so ridiculous to heat an entire house, when you (and your family) are only in a small part of it. Great video! 🙌🏽
I used to live in Tokyo and what got me was the lack of insulation.
I'm more curious how you don't have frozen water pipes. I live in Norther Wisconsin, current temp is -2C, the furnace runs 3 sections, basement loop(heats basement) bedrooms(does the 4 bedrooms) and main(living, dining, kitchen and both bathrooms) I only turn on the main section to prevent pipes from freezing, which happens at 40F you'll start getting slush in the pipes. From there its a short trip to frozen pipes and then worse burst pipes. Bedroom temp currently is 0C, unpleasant to say the least, a down blanket and a fur blanket are required for sleeping in these temps. To expensive to heat the bedrooms since you have to heat all 4 of them, and there's only me.
Slush at 40F in the pipes? What the heck is in your water?
@@corthirteenth94 My guess is slush happens if the indoor temp is set to 40F while it’s really cold outside, e.g. 0F. Some pipes could be in/near exterior walls, or in the unheated basement, or in/near the bedroom section that’s kept colder.
I live in the UK - my old neighbour didn't have central heating until a couple of years ago. He has two open fires and had a small gas heater that he carried into every room where he was. It was very very cold nonetheless, and he was constantly ill - they've now installed airsource heating in his house and he's much much healthier. I didn't know that there were still houses where there's no central heating, that was eye opening. In fact, another neighbour told me just yesterday that they don't have central heating either! Just a few fireplaces and electric heaters.
My parents don’t have central heating living in Scotland
@@sarah-kk4om I'm in Scotland too :) Western Isles.
I don't have central heating in my flat, just electric radiators in each room. That's fairly common in newbuild flats.
Old Houses like ours here in Switzerland also did not have Central Heating.
It was really Beautiful to see that old Japanese House. Thank you
Such an interesting video, watching from chilly Scotland 🥶❤
I grew up in various homes with a mix of heating styles, but eventually central heating for many years, which I thought was the most convenient, "set it & forget it." Eventually, I got my own house which had zone heating, and I wasn't too sure about living with it, until I realized I could finally keep my bedroom cold enough to fall asleep quickly and easily, while keeping my office warm enough to keep working from home, and I could make my spare room whatever temperature necessary for the day's activities. Warmer for some craft projects, colder for those projects where I tended to overheat (oddly enough, mostly while sewing, lol).
But the most important thing was simply *having* heating, and I could remember some years in my childhood where we didn't have much of a budget for heating most of our rooms, and some mornings I'd wake up to frost on the insides of the windows in my bedroom...which was a little *too* cold, but may have been where I got my need to "sleep cold."
Ironically, I moved back in with my parents a few years ago to help take care of them in their old age, in a house with central heating...and I am even now typing this out with the window wide open despite it being the night after Christmas, just so my bedroom can cool down so I can sleep...and yes, that's even with the heater vent completely blocked off. My bedroom is on the southwest corner of the house, and passive solar gain still heats up my bedroom even on the shortest, darkest days of the year!
That's not what central heating is, though? Central heating just means that the heat is supplied from a central source to radiators in all apartments. It does not mean that radiators in different rooms don't have individual controls on them. Yes, you will always have some amount of heat coming from the pipes connecting everything together. But the pipes by themselves are not an efficient heat exchange medium. With central heating, you can still control the temperature of each room individually by turning the flow to each radiator up or down.
Sleeping cold is the best cause I actually get proper use of my comforter 😅
@@Yutani_Crayvencentral heating can also be heated or cool air passed thru vents. That's what we use in the south (as well as gas heaters due to cheaper cost ) . We do not have radiators here
The bigger question is why don't they insulate their homes so that at least they would not have to heat much or waste so much money on kerosene and electricity? In the winter air tends to be drier so having a well insulated home makes it so it can dry out better in the winter and be dehumidified in the summer.
Modern Japanese homes are built now with better insulation and zonal or central inverter heat/cooling. He showed an older traditional home. Even traditional styled home built now have inverter heat/cooling whether central or zonal, but most are zonal.
At least kerosene and electric companies are making a lot of money during winter.
these are OLD homes. that was the whole point of the video
Burning kerosene requires a lot of ventilation. The CO2 and very importantly the large amounts of moisture must be removed from the house. Insulation would be less beneficial than you may first assume.
@@brianreynolds3508 Unfortunately no, new homes are not built much better than this. Code requires almost nothing different than it has for the past 25 years. Almost no homes are built with central systems (perhaps 10% at best). You can definitely have a home built with one, but it is extremely rare. If any house has "zonal" heating/cooling, it is essentially announcing that it is poorly insulated/wrapped. If a home is properly insulated and airtightness is at proper levels, then the whole building should have a fairly homogenised temperature.
We don't have real winters but in Portugal we also don't have central heating. Some people have fireplaces, others might have some sort of a radiator depending on where you live, but most of the times, winters can be uncomfortable. Sometimes being outside is warmer than staying inside. Mold is a big issue no matter if the house is old or new. Because of that, we have to additionally buy electric radiators and dehumidifiers. Luckily winters are quite short.
Thanks! It helps me to understand why I feel so cold in Japanese apartments right now!
So does it not get cold enough for your pipes to freeze?
So, no central heating, but go with the use of space heaters or open flames - What a great combination to set a papered house ablaze in flames!
They have fire sprinklers built in 😂😂😂
Indoor charcoal-burner at 0:21 ?? It's shouting "carbon monoxide" to me
Yolo
Did you not watch the whole video? Missed the part about Japanese homes having great ventilation due to humidity?
@@ssaunders1122 I did notice that. But still wouldn't want to dice with CO gas. Can happen in tents also, where you'd expect gases would diffuse through fabric even w/o ventilation holes
@@turtsable A cat sure wouldn't get its 9 lives with those
@@daffyduk77 a tent is a whole lot smaller of a space. And they have been doing this for generations just fine. Totally different environments and circumstances.
Fascinating. I never knew, so I never asked, and nevertheless I am happy to have a better understanding of this element of daily life in Japan.
Very interesting and informative video. The homes are beautiful.
Very informative. Do you need to worry about pipes freezing without central heating?
Having lived in a small village in the UK with no mains gas, we had a coal burning stove installed. It would take a while for the lounge to warm up. You get used to it being cold first thing in the morning ; it’s not the end of the world. You just get dressed in warm clothing very quickly! You can keep the stove going overnight by banking up the coal and then it doesn’t take too long to restart the fire in the morning.
Central heating can make rooms feel very stuffy and overheated.
Turn the thermostat down-- overheating solved.
Central heating in a well insulated home is cost efficient and healthy.
No one has ever said that last part. Brits are wild
Although I like modern houses with central floor heating, I have fond memories of my grandma lighting the coal stove in the morning. I remember being tucked in a thick feather blanket as my grandma lighted the fire in a stove in a cold room in the winter. Yeah, and the toilet was outside the building, what a treat to go outside to -15 celsius lol
Central heating can dry the air significantly.
I imagine having a house that's full of hot water pipes but living in an earthquake prone country may also be a contributing factor to a lack of central heating.
Electric underfloor heating might be a good solution.
In the UK in recent years, heated clothes airers are used as background / ambient heating - or the only heating, in increasingly mild winters - because utility bills are so high.
These are cheaper and much kinder to clothes than a tumble dryer, they are warm but never hot to the touch, they fold flat to store, they’re extremely lightweight and portable and they cost pennies to run. They don’t give off water like kerosene stoves do. And of course you can use them for their intended purpose. (They’re also great for putting wet shoes near, because it’s a gentle heat.)
The opposite could also be said. Japan should have absolutely fantastic access to thermal energy based on the same principle.
Thank you for explaining this so well.
Great educational video. Thanks.
I see Japanese man giving me a tour of his parent's traditional japanese home, I leave a like and subscribe. thank you for having us as virtual guests friend. I look forward to watching more of your content in the future.
Thank you for watching and subs! I'll show you Japan more!