How to Fix Your House

Without knocking holes in the wall

So imagine you rented a house, but it's too hot. The landlord set the temperature to a comfortable 25C, because he's paying the bills, but it's hellish in here. You get a thermometer, and it's actually 35 degrees.

What's up?

Well, obviously, the heating is running too hard. Too many calories coming in.

And obviously, not enough heat is escaping through the walls. Not enough calories going out.

But before you go knocking holes in the wall or messing with the boiler, you might want a look at the thermostat.

Sadly it's one of those electronic German thingys, and the controls are incomprehensible to mortals.

It's just like the goddamn microwave, which is covered in pictures of fish and chickens and has a numeric keypad and a display but every time you try to cook something it just does something weird.

Nowhere is there a button that just nukes things for a minute or so.

No hope here. Let's imagine that the landlord, after translating the manual from the original German and thinking very hard for three days, set it up right.

Another place to look is the sensor.

Somewhere, there's going to be a little device that measures the temperature, and tells the thermostat what temperature it is, so that the thermostat can work out whether it wants things hotter or colder.

So you follow wires, and eventually you find a little box with no obvious function. And it's next to a window, which is open.

Cold air is blowing through the open window, and so the region around the window is the coldest place in the house.

The central heating is working very hard to make the region around the window 25C. That makes the rest of the house far too hot.

So you close the open window.

And everything fixes itself by magic.