Life in a Stone Oven

Since the beginning of time, dwellings in this part of the world were built to keep people warm. Not much has changed in the recent century and like in many parts of the world, structures here are built out of local materials.  In our little corner of North Yorkshire, both limestone and sandstone are abundant, making them the most common building materials for all structures.

Our house is three stories tall and made out of large stone blocks. Our exterior walls are solid stone ranging in thickness from 18” to 24”. Modern building code were written to keep as much warmth in as possible, so the ceilings on the main floor of the house are on 7’ 6”.  With the thick walls, modern windows and low ceilings, our house is warm and cozy during the eight months of cold drizzle this country serves up every year.

This same structure does a pretty good job of keeping us cool when summer temperatures stay in the 60’s and 70’s.  Unfortunately, several days of 80 F and temperatures not dropping much at night, result in our gorgeous solid stone structure turning into a giant pizza oven.

So many east facing windows!

I apply every bit of thermal dynamics and common sense resulting from growing up in an old farmhouse without AC and multiple stints of living in deserts and in the tropics. I installed

reflective film on all the east and west facing windows in this house. There are blackout blinds on every window in the house.

I open all the windows at night. Since the sun comes up at around 4:30 AM here, I close all the east facing blinds before I go to bed. Those blinds get opened around noon, when the sun moves to the west side of the house. The west windows get closed and blinds and curtains drawn. I sometimes run the exhaust fan above the stove all morning just to draw hot air out.

We use every trick in the book to retain cool air and repel the hot. Once these giant stones get hot, it’s a loosing battle to cool off the air inside.

At 3:00 pm today, it was 89° F/32° C outside, 80° F/ 27° C in my living room and 84° F/29° C in the office. Thankfully, a couple of hundred dollars, and some redneck engineering means it’s a gloriously cool 66° F/19° C in our bedroom.

I’m riding out the heat way while lounging on the bed with a BIG glass of iced tea. 

The towel holds the flex pipe in place and prevents from scratching up the dresser. It is NOT pretty, but is sure is cool!

This fabulous free standing AC unit is nearly as unBritish as my iced tea habit. We purchased this little unit a few years ago. It’s a bit unwieldy but worth every penny! 

Homes in this part of the world are heated with hot water radiators, so no duct work that allows for the magic of central AC. American style window AC unit don’t exist here, because very few windows here are sash styled that slide up making a tidy space for an AC unit. All the windows in our house have a solid lower pane and a top pane that swings out. The first couple of years with this AC unit, we used a super complicated rip stop nylon contraption with a ridiculous amount of Velcro. Nylon offers absolutely NO insulation value, blows around in the wind and it was a pain to install and remove.  

This year, my redneck ingenuity kicked in and I just may have outdone myself!  I bought a piece of double walled poly-carbonate (kinda like a heavy duty plastic cardboard). I cut it to the exact dimensions of the window space and cut a hole for the exhaust hose. I covered the inside with blackout curtain lining and put Velcro all the way around the edges on the back. (The window already has Velcro around the edges, because my other wildly un-British belief is that windows should have insect screens. That’s a whole separate story…)

It’s a bit loud and occasionally has to be rolled into the bathroom to have its tank drained, but sleeping comfortably during a heatwave is life changing!