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genuinegirly · 01-26-2010, 02:13 PM

Here's an interesting idea: Voluntarily living without heat.
I think I'm too much of a wimp for it, but it seems to work for some people:

Quote:

Chilled by Choice
By PENELOPE GREEN
SERIOUS cold, Justen Ladda said, is when the sponge in the kitchen sink feels like wood or the toothpaste freezes or the refrigerator turns itself off, as it did one particularly frigid day last winter. Not that Mr. Ladda, a 56-year-old sculptor who has lived heat-free in his Lower East Side loft for three decades, is bothered by such extremes. “Winter comes and goes,” he’ll tell you blithely, adjusting his black wool scarf and watch cap. (Along with fingerless gloves, long underwear and felt slippers, they are part of Mr. Ladda’s at-home uniform when the mercury dips.)

Mr. Ladda, whose work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, decided long ago to live without central heating. Proper temperature control, you see, would require insulating his wooden ceiling, and ruining its fine acoustics. “I know this sounds really lame, but I listen to a lot of music and it just sounds better,” he said. Also, the rent on his unimproved live-work loft is only $300, well below many people’s winter utility bills.

But beyond thrift and acoustics, what is perhaps most notable about Mr. Ladda’s chilly interior is that like, say, tepee-dwelling Mongolian reindeer herders, or perhaps some very rugged environmentalists, Mr. Ladda has come to thrive in the cold.

As Americans across the country wrestle with spouses and their thermostats over how low to go — as they join contests like Freeze Yer Buns, now in its third year, a challenge posed by Deanna Duke, a Seattle-based environmental blogger who calls herself the Crunchy Chicken, to lower the thermostat to around 55 degrees, or follow the lead of the Maine couple trying to live comfortably in a furnace-free house and blogging about it in their Cold House Journal — there are those who are living nearly without heat by choice, and doing just fine, thank you very much. Indeed, 55 degrees would qualify as sauna conditions for Mr. Ladda and others whose interiors hover around the 30- or 40-degree mark in deep winter.

Many belong to that hardy genus Artista domestica, a group unusually skilled at foraging in urban frontiers, and long-known for sacrificing “normal” creature comforts in favor of other boons like low overhead and capacious, atmospheric habitats. Why they stick it out, and how they cope, are object lessons in creative adaptation fueled by thrift, environmentalism and a commitment to unique real estate. (Denial and long underwear help, too.)

Take Jake Dibeler, a 21-year-old performance artist living in an unheated warehouse in Baltimore with five roommates and two cats. There are concrete walls, floor-to-ceiling windows and hangar-like ceilings, “which means that even if it gets warm outside,” Mr. Dibeler said, “it still takes about a month for our apartment to catch up.”

The rent is $2,200, split six ways, and it’s all worth it, he continued, because there’s a huge stage he and his friends can perform on, “a dream come true in my own home.” Space heaters are expensive and, anyway, a placebo at best, he said, but Mr. Dibeler and his friends have built a yurt in the center of the living room, “or part of a yurt, really, the frame part, which we cover with sheets and line with afghans, and then we drag the cats in. At times, we all get frustrated and pine for a real home with heat and lower ceilings. Then we remember how wonderful it is to be living with five other best friends and making art and how it will get warm eventually. We just have to suck it up and wear a bunch of layers, even if it means looking like an Olsen twin.”

Attitude, not clothing, is what thaws Daniel McCloskey and his roommates in Pittsburgh. Last year, Mr. McCloskey, 22, bought two poorly insulated turn-of-the century clapboard houses for $41,000 in the Lawrenceville neighborhood there, and turned them into a writer’s retreat he named the Cyberpunk Apocalypse Writer’s Co-op. It’s sort of like Yaddo or MacDowell — “like where?” he asked when this reporter made the comparison — but without all the amenities (maid service, picnic basket lunches or sufficient heat).

Mr. McCloskey offers monthlong residencies to emerging writers, which is to say a free room in the house at the back. There is a furnace, but his finances are low and mostly it stays off. (Mr. McCloskey, who is writing a novel, last worked as a parking attendant and a poster salesman.) A wood stove in the kitchen area can bring the temperature there up to about 50 degrees, Mr. McCloskey said, if he sees fit to fire it up. Wood is expensive, too; he relies on windfalls, like dead trees from a friend who was clearing land nearby. Electric pipe heaters keep the water supply from freezing, but not the visiting artists.

“We had an author named Terence Hawkins do a reading last month,” Mr. McCloskey recalled. “I tried to get the wood stove going, but he was just sitting there shivering. I think his opening lines were: ‘Hello, I am Terence Hawkins. I am the elderly man in a tweed jacket, and if I am shivering it is only because I am cold.’ ”

Mr. McCloskey warms himself up by spending time in coffee shops, he said — “an hour will do it” — and by maintaining an upbeat demeanor. Doesn’t his girlfriend, with whom he shares a drafty attic room, get grumpy?

“What makes her grumpy is using resources,” he said. “We’re all about staying positive.”

JOE AHEARN, 23, who lives with four roommates in a Queens warehouse (rent: $3,000), uses a space heater in his bedroom (there are five bedrooms and a basement), but the bathroom and the main living area “are pretty much a lost cause,” he said. Showering between November and March is a challenge. A music promoter whose company is called Sleep When Dead, he hosts shows in his house five out of seven nights, which raises the temperature a good 10 or 20 degrees, or so it seems. “Human beings are remarkably efficient space heaters,” Mr. Ahearn said, and he basks in the damp, warm fug that remains after a performance. Still, his most successful cold-abatement strategy has been romantic: last year he had a girlfriend, and spent most nights at her house.

Then there are those who seek out the cold for its clarifying effects. Winifred Gallagher, a behavioral science writer who lives in a warm town house on the Upper West Side, makes monthly winter pilgrimages to a century-old, “very primitive” former one-room schoolhouse in Long Eddy, N.Y. There is no water when the temperature is below freezing (she hauls it from a stream), but there is a wood-burning stove.

If it’s 20 degrees outside, as it was last week, it might be 15 indoors, so Ms. Gallagher will stoke the fire and go for a long walk; when she returns, the room can be 50 degrees, and 60 by bedtime, though it slides precipitously toward freezing as she sleeps. “The main reason why I do these winter trips,” she said, “is that when your house is 15 degrees, the only problem you have is getting warm. Focusing on survival is right up there with a Zen retreat when it comes to clearing the mind.”

And anyway, she pointed out, “we didn’t evolve to sit on a chair in a temperature-controlled environment staring at a screen all day.”

How cold is too cold? With the right equipment, humans can endure enormous temperature dips. Dr. Peter Hackett, director of the Institute for Altitude Medicine in Telluride, Colo., and a veteran expeditioner to Mount Everest and other frigid peaks, has recorded minus 50 degree temperatures outside his tent on a climb of Mount McKinley in Alaska. “It’s extremely unpleasant,” he said, but certainly survivable, albeit with the right gear: long underwear, layers of fleece, and down or synthetic puff jackets.

“Our best responses are behavioral — building a fire, putting on more clothes. But for those who choose not to heat their homes or who live in extremely cold environments, there are some physiological changes that occur,” he said, ticking them off. “Thyroid function goes up, creating more body heat, and metabolism changes, too, causing you to burn more fuel, fat especially, which generates a bit more heat.”

There are increased “vasodilations in the extremities,” he added, recorded in people who work outside. “But these adaptations are not that impressive. They are fairly limited, compared to the physiological changes we go through in adapting to altitude or the heat. Ten days of heat training for an athlete can be very effective, whereas a week of cold training doesn’t do much of anything.”

Tell that to Janet Smith, an engineer and landscape designer living in nearby Ridgway, Colo. Ms. Smith, 53, inhabits a one-room rubble-stone house built in 1894, one of three buildings she bought in 2001 for $149,000. Poetically lovely, they are also impossible to fill with heat, presenting Ms. Smith with a living choice she has embraced with gusto, throwing open windows and doors year-round, and using her own body as a solar panel when the sun shines.

“The best thing about living in a non-isothermal house” — isothermal means “constant in temperature” — “is that you’re able to walk from indoors to out of doors all the time,” she said. “What limits us is only our fear of the cold.”

At 7,000 feet, Ridgway offers some seriously scary weather, “five months of full-on winter where there is snow on the ground,” she said, with temperatures well below zero. Ms. Smith’s house is typically 10 degrees higher; she can warm herself beside her wood-burning stove, but the heat it generates goes right out the wood-slat roof.

While Ms. Smith may seem preternaturally rugged, she said anyone could live in the extremes she inhabits; it’s just a matter of the right clothing (she would like to design a line of indoor rough wear). “I don’t think people know how to dress for the cold, and that’s the first issue. What’s right for ski wear is not right for living indoors.”

She likes her LaCrosse boots and fleece pants, but the sleeves of her down jacket get in her way when she’s washing dishes, and make an annoying swishing noise, she said. (Like some other heat-eschewing folks, Ms. Smith keeps her pipes from freezing by letting the faucets drip, 15 to 30 drips a minute; any more than that causes an ice buildup and the dishes freeze in the sink. She has also rigged her toilet to run constantly.)

“My stone buildings are so beautiful, I love living in them,” she said. “There’s a whole aesthetic of living close to natural materials.”

Friends do worry, she admitted, and some romantic partners haven’t been hardy enough. Dinner parties are out, too, “but I’ve never been much of an entertainer,” she said.

Still, she added, “I’m the one, when the electricity goes out, who can keep going. We shouldn’t have to disrupt our lives because our houses are cold. I think it scares people, too. People don’t want to relate to me living in the cold.”

Mr. Ladda on the Lower East Side doesn’t entertain, either, but he occasionally has overnight guests.

“I had Japanese friends here once,” he said. “And when they left, they bowed and said solemnly, ‘We are very sorry you have to live this way.’ ”