Warm Like a Cow.

I’ve been working on motorcycle warmth, on how do you keep warm in a 60mph cold blast? The wind chill factor at that speed is ~ -16*C so it’s very easy to get below zero. The body produces between 70 and 800 watts of heat energy with the 800 being when we’re doing strenuous exercise so I guess at rest it’s around 2-300 watts. From my experiments for example the hand produces around 16 watts which, when you consider the skin surface area, is why we wear gloves. A comfortable hand temperature is around 17*C and those 16 watts will only maintain a temperature a few degrees above the ambient so less than say 14*C and they begin to feel cold. We’re all aware of central heating and that an average house requires some 30Kwatts to heat and maintain it at 20*C. That’s 30,000 watts! And that’s why we add insulation. Now without going into R values and stuff my calculations suggest if our 300 watts of heat output was insulated by say a 5mm layer of expanded polyurethane it could maintain a temperature difference in excess of 15*C so the house need only be maintained at 5*C i.e. only needing energy on the coldest days. Or to put it another way, if we developed a 2” hair layer like gorillas we wouldn’t need central heating at all. I mean they don’t do they? Cats don’t, dogs don’t. But no, we’ve opted for heating our whole pile of bricks and plaster, wood and furnishings to a comfortable 20*C.
Derrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!
In fact if we focused on heating ourselves I'd imagine combined with some clothing insulation we'd need less than 100 watts to keep us nice and warm.
I’m thinking it all went wrong with the caveman fashion of getting a full body Brazilian. “OMG Julian it’s not growing back! Now we’ll be fucked come winter.” And now it’s like we’ve forgotten why we invented cloths in the first place- to keep us warm! We’ve forgotten that we’re warm blooded and we produce heat ourselves and keeping warm is about keeping that heat in, not warming the whole bloody neighbourhood. That’s why I’m wearing my cow onesie I got for Christmas.