I noted Stuart Staniford's exploration of home energy efficiency a few weeks ago. Now he's really outdone himself with a set of graphs about his house, calculating how much impact past energy efficiency improvement had and how much impact future improvements might have.
Posted by simon at March 10, 2012 1:42 PM in energy
One thing I realized after I'd done that was that they almost certainly didn't use that much energy back in the nineteenth century but instead had most of the house extremely cold and huddled around the stove in one or two rooms. I estimate that keeping the entire house at 70F with no insulation would have required 22 cords of wood.