Quote:
Originally Posted by Hektore
If the cold is a problem at night, and if peeing at night means crawling out of your sleeping bag and exposing yourself to even colder air outside the tent to get it done, then it totally wouldn't be worth it to me. Especially when you consider that you're going to have to 'reheat' your bag by the time you return.
Wear and extra shirt/sweats.
My inclination is no, it doesn't make any difference for the reason you stated. The liquid has already been heated, and if anything holding it will work better to keep you warm because the added heat reservoir in your bladder will be more total volume to cool, before you die of hypothermia.
What may help, if you're not already dehydrated is abstaining from water/cold foods which would cool your core when you eat/drink them.
As for the house, in a house you heat the air, which is also what your thermostat measures. So, in theory a fuller house has less air to heat, as for heating the stuff in the house, the more stuff the more it takes to heat it. I don't know that this is answerable for certain without considering what the house is filled with.
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If you fill the house with things that have a higher heat capacity than air (as most things do) it will take longer to warm up - this leads some people to conclude that it must take more energy to keep your house to temperature.
The problem is that the other side of the equation is that when your heating shuts off, those items release their heat more slowly than air would have, and therefore delay the heating system from re-starting (thus saving you energy).
On balance, what this does is slow down the cycles of your heating system.
Seeing as each time your heating system cycles (from fully cold to fully hot to fully cold again) there are fixed losses, regardless of how long it's on for, anything that reduces the number of cycles it goes through saves you energy.
Therefore in the long run, thermodynamics demonstrates that a filled house takes less energy to heat than an empty one.
Status: BUSTED
As for the urine argument, it is true that your body uses less energy to keep X kg warm than it does to keep X + Y kg warm.
The problem is, that if you pee out Y kg of urine that is warmer than its surroundings, you loose all of the heat you invested in warming up that pee to start with.
Even if you pee into a bottle and keep that inside your clothes to retain the heat it won't help, as you are moving a warm mass of pee from your core (where it is well insulated) to your outer layers (where it will bleed heat).
All in all, whatever you do it's about the same, but as with the heating system argument, the fewer times you cycle hot-cold-hot (i.e. open your clothes and loose heat while you wee) the less you suffer, so the best option is to allow your bladder to fill as full as you can manage, and then pee as rarely as you can.
Status: BUSTED