> The house has lessons for how we can heat our homes more efficiently today

The problem in Europe isn't keeping warm in the winter but keeping cool in the summer. In part thanks to their near-total lack of AC in residential buildings, Europe has an extremely high heat-related death rate. 200k people per year die of heatstroke in Europe: this accounts for 36% of global heat-related deaths. This is despite Europe being only 9% of the world population, having a very cool climate in comparison to India and similar countries, and being among the richest regions in the world.

I live in Europe. My house gets too warm maybe 1 week of the year. I bought a big floor standing fan and it fixed that.

30 degrees Centigrade is exceptional here.

Whereas in other parts of Europe it gets much hotter. Probably best not to generalise over a whole continent that covers 36 degrees of latitude (more than the contiguous 48 states of the US, at about 25 degrees), and goes from islands sat in the Gulf Stream to land sat next to an even larger land mass.

Even parts of the US that have AC standard have learned to lean on it so hard that they've lost architectural features which, 50-100 years ago, kept a house cooler in Summer.

I once lived in a rental house in a "historical" neighborhood (on US timelines, not European) in a big city, and most of the houses had porches on two or three sides, depending on the cardinal orientation. These kept sunlight from falling directly on main body of the house, and strategically placed windows let you open two or three and get a breeze through the whole house.

We learned this visiting a neighbor who owned their home. The rental was not as well-maintained: some of the window frames had been painted shut over decades of touchups, but we never thought much of it. The day we jimmied them open and experienced a true cross-breeze through the living room was a HUGE "Aha!" moment.

Setting aside porches, even simple features like awnings above windows (esp. second-story windows) have fallen out of fashion, but they can reduce the demand on indoor AC significantly. They save money, but people think they look old-fashioned or something like that.

> 200k people per year die of heatstroke in Europe

Extremely doubtful. Even Teh Grauniad disagrees.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/17/human-ma...

Note that the Grauniad figures include some very unusual heat waves. There's no way the normal average could be a lot higher in years that were a lot colder.

Most of the tricks seem like they'd work in the cooling direction too. They amount to insulation and thermal mass. You would need AC to actually lower the temperature, but those improvements would let you run the cooling on a lower duty cycle.

My local HVAC guy joked with me that the next Bezos/Musk billionaire type is going to be the guy who runs an HVAC company in Europe.

Europe is pretty big and varied.

>The problem in Europe isn't keeping warm in the winter but keeping cool in the summer. In part thanks to their near-total lack of AC in residential buildings,

The times they are a-changing. Every house on my 21 year old estate came with ac. I'd assume the same for newer constructions. People rarely use it due to the price of electricity. Temps get well over 30C for a couple of weeks in august.