Why didn't I think of that?!

It just dawned on me, and now I feel stupid for not having thought of it earlier. Why not use another method of heat transfer to heat my apartment? Clearly this is the way to go.

When apartment hunting, Mark suggested that I go for something on the top floor and in the corner. That way, I could avoid the noise from my neighbors and live a nice life. I didn't see it that way. The way I saw it was in terms of thermal capacitance and heat transfer. If my neighbors were to all sides, I would never need air conditioning or heating. Since that's not going to happen (being surrounded on all six sides), I thought to see what number I could get.

Well, I'm on the bottom floor, so I have the insulation from the ground, and I have neighbors to each side and above me. That's four sides (including the ground) of six, and the two exposed walls are my smallest in area.

When I come home at night, I might be a bit cold, but when I step into my apartment, it's like I had the heat on! Mind you, it's not room temperature, but it is significantly warmer than outside. So what else can I do?

Well, it's obvious that I'm getting radiation heat from my neighbors (heat is radiating through the walls). But natural convection is almost nothing in an apartment with no moving air, and forced convection is much better at transferring heat than radiation alone, (conduction would help, too, but I'm not going to sleep plastered to the wall) which is why we have convection ovens.

So my thought is to use a fan in winter. In a closed, well-insulated room, turning on a fan actually increases the temperature because of the work done by the motor. Simply moving air does not make you cooler; what you enjoy in the summer is the conduction of heat from your body to your sweat, and the convection from your sweat to the moving (forced) air, like getting out of a pool on a windy day. How does that apply here? Well, if I move air across the surface of the wall, I can better transfer the heat.

If you got out of the pool and there was zero wind, you'd not feel very cold. That's radiation heat transfer. But when it's windy, you hurry for that towel. That's convection.

I'll keep you posted. I'm curious to see how well this works.