A wool sweater is warmer than a cotton shirt. Valuable information in these difficult times

Those who dress warmly do not catch cold easily; you have to know. In the newspaper this week a thermophysicist, Boris Kingma, came into play, who thought we ‘had forgotten how to keep warm properly’. Shit, how stupid we are! And now?

Fortunately, there was Johanna Louwagie, ‘industrial engineer at the Textile Group of the University of Ghent’. According to her, it is important to “find out where your own heat leaks are”. Your shirt does not fit well in your pants or your sleeves are too wide? You potentially lose a lot of heat because of this. You didn’t know that, 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, material and degree of coverage of the garment”. In other words: a wool sweater is warmer than a cotton shirt. Valuable information in these difficult times.

Fascinated, I continued to read. “Because clo values ​​were devised by the U.S. military, clothing insulation of 1 clo is typical military uniform gear, including undergarments. If you’re wearing that, you need a 21 degree interior temperature for comfortable TV watching.

I saw these soldiers in front of me, hanging on the sofa at 21 degrees in their uniforms, with underwear, at least, we hope. Questions arose, such as: Does the US military have nothing better to do than watch television in comfort? But above all: 21 degrees? Isn’t that very hot? Maybe something went wrong here when converting from US Fahrenheit to Celsius?

After some research on international “clo values”, I found the US room temperature for uniformed soldiers watching TV: 71 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s even hotter than I feared, namely 21.6 degrees Celsius. Twenty-one point six degrees! Even my cold 83-year-old mother takes off her cardigan, huffing.

Anger seized me. In our house, the thermostat is set to 19. And those American soldiers, across the ocean, sit on their lazy asses in this sweltering heat while our climate turns hellish? Bunch of wimps! Why don’t they crawl in the snow, getting used to the freezing battles against Putin, in the Siberian tundra?

Well, I’m no longer participating. 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.

These bastards don’t have underwear, after all.