Closed Shutters do work.

Air conditioning the old fashioned way.

Most days, if you drive around the various villages, some would remind you of a ghost town. One house after the other, has all its window shutters closed.

Passing by them, I often used to wonder what could have happened, to get so many empty homes. For me, closed shutters meant that the owners are away and the house is empty. I even pictured all the furniture inside covered by those voluminous white sheets.
But on the other hand, I thought how wonderfully cheap it would be to buy here ( seeing that most seemed empty )

Well the mystery was cleared pretty early on for me. As a lot of the houses here were built a long time ago, they mostly have walls about 60cm thick. The old guys knew what they were doing, as these walls are its own air condition system. This helps keep the cool in in summer and the heat in in winter.

The traditional way is this :
In summer, every morning and evening you open all windows for about one hour. Obviously you need to do it just after sun-up and sun-down. The rest of the day you close all windows and shutters, all the time.
In winter you do the same, but only open all windows for about 15 minutes morning and evening. Longer would turn you into an icicle. Some homes even keep the shutters closed during the day to keep the heating costs down.

Coming from South-Africa, where the windows are always open, it was a bit of a challenge for me to remember the window procedure. In the beginning, I used to leave the windows open in the hot summer, thinking it would cool us down. But since I started to do it the Burgenland way, our house is a comfortable cool temperature, even when we have 30 degrees and above outside.

We wanted to recreate the light feel that we were used to, and thus we have no shutters on our windows, but only unlined curtains. Even though it cost us a few degrees in coolness, I wouldn't change our light feel for the darker shut-in version.

Biggi