Winter and combating the cold

So far, this has been an extraordinarily mild Highveld winter. Already, there are a few fruit trees coming into blossom on plots in our ~ usually freezing ~ area. But that doesn ' t mean that, as I grow older, I don ' t feel the cold more and more each year, which has me wondering why we don ' t take winter on the Highveld more seriously. The fact is, we South Africans live in a fool ' s paradise when it comes to winter. Houses in South Africa simply aren ' t designed or constructed to cope with what are temperatures that in northern climes would result in all the architectural refinements that have been developed over centuries to keep inhabitants warm and, it must be added, dry. And perhaps it is because we have no rainfall in winter ~ or at least very little ~ that these innovations haven ' t made their way into our building codes. For example, our house, in one of the coldest parts of Gauteng, has huge 3m square glass windows in each room on both sides, north-facing and south. The ones on the northern side of the house are great on a winter ' s day, and the low-slanting winter sun streams in, warming the rooms most charmingly. As the sun sets, however, all the warmth captured during the day is soon lost to the chill evening air outside. And let ' s not talk about the rooms on the southern side of the house, which receive no sun in winter, and are like fridges. Seriously. Think of the cold room in a farmhouse, hung with sides of meat, cheeses and birds maturing for the pot. That ' s how cold our South-facing rooms are in winter. When we first moved to our smallholding some 30 years ago I remember that in the evenings of our first few winters we would eat our dinner wearing overcoats. After a few years, however, we acquired a Jetmaster fireplace, which we installed in the kitchen( a room itself proportioned like the nave of a cathedral). It was the biggest model Jetmaster has ever built.( I don ' t know if it still exists but there used to be a large thatched fast-food restaurant called BJ’ s just before Harrismith on the way to Durban. Keeping this cavernous, warehouse-sized space warm was, in the centre, a Jetmaster the same size as ours, a hungry beast that requires a steady diet of logs to keep it blazing.) In the first year of our Jetmaster we were concerned that it was too big for our kitchen, and I sought to limit the size of the fire by reducing the space in the grate with a brick on either side. However, it didn ' t take me long to remove the bricks, and now we enjoy a nightly blaze of such heat and proportions that we could easily fire up the boiler of a steam train. And ours is not the only cold house on the Highveld, I ' m sure, or throughout the country even. So why are cold-climate building materials, such as double-glazed windows and central heating not easily available? More importantly, why don ' t architechts specify such items when designing houses in what are cold areas? All you can get in South Africa, it seems to me, is underfloor heating and pink stuff with which to insulate your ceiling in your roof. Part of the problem, I realise, is that our winters don ' t feel really cold most of the time. Because there ' s no rain and very little cloud during a Highveld winter, daytime temperatures are positively balmy and it ' s only when the sun disappears behind a cloud that one quickly feels the chill( largely because of the thinness of the air we breathe at this altitude). Also, our winters aren’ t all that long ~ there are only a couple of really cold months each year ~ and so expenditure on double glazing with which to insulate the house, or central heating, would seem like expensive overkill to many. So for the most part of the day we don ' t think about the niceties of warming our houses with much more than a couple of electric heaters in strategic rooms, or mobile gas fires. And during the day many of us spend much of our time in the sunlight peeling off layers of clothing in winter much like peeling an onion.“ Don ' t you have heaters?” I hear you ask. Of course we do, and our electricity bill in winter is unpleasantly high as a result. Also, keeping our Jetmaster fed is a task we take very seriously and we are more than happy to demonstrate our prowess with a chainsaw to any neighbour who has dead or unwanted trees. As a result, you can view our woodpile quite easily on Google Earth.

WRITTEN BY SMALLHOLDERS, FOR SMALLHOLDERS