You did remember to switch off the central heating, right?

Seriously though, how on earth is your house *that* hot - mine only
gets that hot in 90F weather?

Nope, we aint got no central 'eating. Too sophisticated for these parts.
Real answer is that there isn't any mains gas in the village.

The thermometer in the hallway this morning at 09:00 read 27°C, so it had
cooled a little bit overnight (from 31°C) yesterday. It was a tad difficult
sleeping, no duvet/covers required.

Our house gets an awful lot of solar heating through large double-glazed
windows which face east (back of the house) and west (front of the house)
with very little glazing to the north. It's lovely in the winter time when
its sunny as it means we can turn the heating completely off. The house is
very well insulated with underfloor insulation, cavity wall insulation and
the loft is insulated to a depth of 45 cm. The glazing is all Pilkington-K
and the house has been sealed to prevent any heat-loss. The way around the
build up of damp and stale air that would normally become a problem unless
you kept the windows open and lost all your heat in cold weather is that I
have fitted a heat recovery ventilator (HRV) which runs continuoulsy in the
background and replaces the entire volume of air inside the house every 1.5
hours.

At the moment the HRV is switched off and all the windows are open, but this
does not give as much 'fresh air' as when the HRV is running. Trouble, as
its name suggests, it doesn't provide cooling unless I get up in the loft
and alter a few settings to put it into 'summer mode', then it will
ventilate normally without recovering the heat.

Still, it means that our house, even on the coldest winter's night is always
warm 23°C (the plasma screen seems to warm the house up by itself) and yet
our heating bills (a couple of small storage heaters) are very low, if not
minimal.

But a well-insulated house can get damn hot in the summer, that's the
downside; but you do get used to it, eventually.
________________
Nick.
Otter Valley, Devon
83 m amsl
http://www.ottervalley.co.uk