Those who dress warmly do not get cold easily; you need to know. In the newspaper this week, a thermophysicist, Boris Kingma, was quoted as saying that we ‘have forgotten how to keep ourselves warm’. Jeez, how stupid of us! What now?
Luckily there was Johanna Louwagie, ‘industrial engineer at the Textile Group of Ghent University’. According to her, it is important to ‘discover where your own heat leaks are. Does your shirt not fit well in your pants or are your sleeves too wide? You potentially lose a lot of heat through this.’ Didn’t you know, did you?
But the article only became really interesting with the third expert, Kris De Decker. He explained how the insulating capacity of a garment is expressed in ‘clo values’. These are ‘determined by the thickness, the material, and the degree of coverage of the garment’. In other words: a wool sweater is warmer than a cotton shirt. Valuable information in these harsh times.
Fascinated, I read on. “Because clo values were devised by the U.S. military, a clothing insulation of 1 clo corresponds to typical military uniform equipment, including underwear. If you wear this, you need an indoor temperature of 21 degrees to watch TV comfortably.’
I saw those soldiers in front of me, hanging on the couch at 21 degrees in their uniform, with underwear, at least, we hope so. Questions arose, such as: Does the US military have nothing better to do than watch TV in comfort? But above all: 21 degrees? Isn’t that very hot? Perhaps something went wrong here when converting the American degrees Fahrenheit to our Celsius?
After some research into international “clo values,” I found the American room temperature for TV-watching soldiers in uniform: 71 degrees Fahrenheit. That is even warmer than I had feared, namely 21.6 degrees Celsius. Twenty-one point six degrees! Even my 83-year-old, cold mother takes off her cardigan, puffing.
Anger seized me. In our house the thermostat is set to 19. And those American soldiers, on the other side of the ocean, sit on their lazy asses in that sweltering heat while our climate goes to hell? Bunch of wimps! Why don’t they crawl through the snow, getting used to icy battles against Putin, in the Siberian tundra?
Well, I’m not participating anymore. I’m going to buy a climate-devouring patio lamp for the balcony. Personally, I think it’s way too hot under such a thing, but my cats are probably happy with it.
Those bastards don’t have underwear, after all.