Backwoods Savage said:
Slow, I tend to think most of us has our sanity challenged every now and then. lol
I do agree with you on the motives. This thing about no heat is not bad as an experiment but as a way of life I would definitely question. If one wants to know what it is like, okay. If one wants to know if it would work all he needs to do is look at history or look at some of the poorer areas of the globe. Yes, people could live that way if forced.....but would only if forced.
Y'know, Backwoods, we pretty much all get our endorphins from different things in life. What they're doing seems to me to be taking things to a kind of nutty extreme, but then my friends back in the burbs definitely think I'm taking things to a nutty extreme by heating with wood and growing much of my own food ( not to mention having moved a 3-hour drive away from the nearest Trader Joe), yet I get a huge morale boost from both things. Showering the way you do, even in summer, seems to me to be a nutty extreme, yet there's something about making that little sacrifice that you feel good about. So really, each to his own.
It is interesting to find out, as the Coldhouse people are doing, how many of the comforts of modern living conditions one can really do perfectly well without. That's a different place for every one of us.
And you're absolutely right that age has a lot to do with how easy or hard it is. By the time people get to "our age," I think the vast majority of us have been through enough periods of one kind of hardship or another that we have our psychological/emotional limits, as well as the very definite physical ones fo the aging and decreasingly resilient body. "Been there, done that," I think to myself, "Don't want to do it again, thanks. I'll try something else."
And by the way, just to prolong the nitpicky practical argument, I question whether running the space heater to warm up the bathroom enough for your one-gallon shower uses less energy than heating an extra half dozen gallons of water. I still shudder at the mere thought of standing around wet and naked in the bathtub in anything less than the height of summer hot weather!