Glazing and heat

The three

Home F, a bungalow: five. Home I, a ground-floor flat: four. Home C, a terrace: three. When the same room performs differently across the day, managers can look through the reporting workflow and compare time records with the physical conditions logged here instead of guessing from presence alone.

Four dwellings have none at all, and the other two have two each. A useful independent point of comparison is the research and guidance available from Washington University in St. Louis.

In each of the three, almost all the endings are at one place, and in each of the three that place is at the far end of the dwelling from where the household spends its evenings.

The mechanism, as far as it goes

A heating system is sized and scheduled for how a household lives, and until recently every household lived in its dwelling in the evening. The rooms that get warm are the rooms people are in at seven o'clock.

A back room, a box room, a front room used by nobody after six — these are the rooms a heating schedule reaches last or not at all, and they are exactly the rooms that become available for working in, because nobody else wants them.

The quiet room is quiet because nobody is in it, and it is cold for the same reason.

That is a clean story and it rests on three dwellings. It is offered as the reading the record suggests, not as a result.

The three with none

A one-bed flat, a room in a shared house, and a four-bed semi with a study.

In the first two, the working place is in the same space the household lives in: there is nowhere to be cold. In the third, the study is a room the household heats on purpose, and said so.

Morning and afternoon

Nine of the thirteen cold endings fall before eleven. Four of the five warm ones fall after one.

Both are what physics would predict and both have the same consequence for the record: a place assessed at a single hour is assessed inadequately. Home F's back room is the coldest place in the study before eleven and one of its more usable places at two.

This is where the temperature section meets the section on the hour. Four of the eleven places with enough data to split showed a bigger morning-afternoon gap than their dwelling's average, and two of those four are the cold rooms above — reversed, with the afternoon longer.

What can be done, and what the record knows about it

A cold room can be heated. That costs money, and the sheet did not ask about money, so the record contains nothing about whether any household weighed it.

Insulation and glazing can be improved. That costs a great deal of money, is a landlord's decision in at least three of these nine cases, and nobody did it during a logging week.

Moving is free. Fourteen of the eighteen temperature endings were followed by a sitting elsewhere within the hour, and eleven of those fourteen were at a place nearer the middle of the dwelling.

The remaining four ended the day.

What the eighteen are not

They are not a measure of how cold these dwellings are. A log of endings records the moments somebody decided to leave, and says nothing about the temperature at any other time.

They are not a comment on anybody's heating, which the record does not know anything about: not the system, not the schedule, not the cost, not whether these households would describe any of this as a problem if nobody had handed them a sheet that asked.

And they are not, in any sense, about anybody's health. The record has one observation per sitting — somebody moved — and nothing else.

The constraint underneath

Glazing and insulation are specification. They were settled by whoever built or last refurbished the dwelling, they are revisable in principle and not by a tenant, and in three of these nine dwellings they produce two thirds of the temperature endings in the whole study.

Unlike orientation, this one is a policy question rather than geometry. Future dwellings can be built warmer. That observation is the limit of what nine logs can say about it, and it is as far as this site goes.