If you're interested in this kind of material, I'd recommend checking out Construction Physics by Brian Potter.
The wonder of modern drywall
231–240 of 277 posts
Re: The wonder of modern drywall
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They're happy until the long-term effects hit them, as stick frame houses need repairs a lot more often. Please explain why you think this is true, I disagree and I work in construction. Once you get a roof and siding on a building, the framing material doesn’t matter. As long as it’s strong enough for the application, the building will remain standing, provided you maintain the roof and siding. I’m living in a bal…
The average quality of construction, due to use of low skill workers, is very bad. That's been my experience living and owning houses in Canada and the US.
Newer houses can have issues with mold if the HVAC is not designed or operated correctly due to the building envelope being wrapped in a vapor barrier, trapping moisture inside. Most of the housing stock is not from this time period, older houses do not have vapor barriers so they breathe a lot better.
All that being said, I’d be skeptical as hell about buying a Lennar or similar tract house built in the last 30 years for the same reasons you stated. I run union electrical work and trust my electricians to do good work, but residential construction is a whole different ballgame, lower skill levels and lots of corner cutting. I will lose money on a job to complete a project correctly, if that’s what it takes. My company has to compete locally and our reputation matters. I don’t trust the people working at home builders to make the same choice, they shit out a bunch of houses and move on, while I have to maintain my reputation and keep customers coming back for a couple decades if I want to keep my job.
Let’s just say if I was having a house built, I’d GC it myself and conduct frequent site visits, probably daily.
My main point was a well-constructed stick built house can last a long time if it’s maintained, but determining if a house is well-built is not particularly easy without cutting walls open and so on.
Re: The wonder of modern drywall
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most European housing is made of concrete, stone, or brick. It absolutely is different from typical US housing, because unless you want to run surface mount everything (which most people don’t in residential), it’s an insane amount of work to run new anything. ‘40’s homes in the US, you typically just tear down to the studs, re-run new stuff, and throw up new drywall. Boom, done. Unless you’re in a place that did blo…
To properly redo an old house, you'll have to redo the siding and probably the roof too.
Yes, if they weren’t redone separately. Each of them has their own lifecycles, so it’s rare they all get done at once.
At that point, most people will just do a full teardown.
Re: The wonder of modern drywall
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
The average quality of construction, due to use of low skill workers, is very bad. That's been my experience living and owning houses in Canada and the US.
Newer houses can have issues with mold if the HVAC is not designed or operated correctly due to the building envelope being wrapped in a vapor barrier, trapping moisture inside. Most of the housing stock is not from this time period, older houses do not have vapor barriers so they breathe a lot better. All that being said, I’d be skeptical as hell about buying a Lennar or similar tract house built in the last 30 year…
My main point is that modern European houses, if well built, don't need maintenance at all. The expectation if you buy a new house or renovate one, is that you won't have to do any maintenance beyond cleaning the roof gutters, for your lifetime (50 years). No siding to repaint or repair, no roof repairs, no sump pump, if there's a basement (likely not) it's fully built in cement on the sides as well.
Re: The wonder of modern drywall
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
To properly redo an old house, you'll have to redo the siding and probably the roof too.
Yes, if they weren’t redone separately. Each of them has their own lifecycles, so it’s rare they all get done at once. At that point, most people will just do a full teardown.
A properly built house doesn't need a teardown for centuries.
Re: The wonder of modern drywall
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
In areas where there are gas transmission lines, sure. Large portions of the country don’t have that infrastructure built out yet, but do have rail lines which provide coal. It’s also a timing/capital issue. It will change eventually, but in the meantime people need their kWh.
Rail lines also provides logistics for methane, which produces many more usable joules per kg of fuel.
I’ve never seem any analysis of feasibility for LNG (probably what you’re referring too) vs pipeline NG for things like power plants. Do we even have sufficient liquifaction facilities for that type of volume? When I hear of that kind of thing, it’s almost always liquifying for export to places like Europe.
Re: The wonder of modern drywall
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting comment with worthwhile content, but the writing style strongly smells of ChatGPT, and the phrase "For someone in your position" is incongruous (who is being addressed?). Did you use it, and if so, would you mind sharing the prompt?
“Terrestrial develops a robotic approach to earthen construction”. person you replied to claims to be a founder of this company, according to LinkedIn Other “tells” in the comment are the subscript “2” and the full spelling of the chemical. Also 3 emdashes
yeah, so the turn in EU towards renewable energy is driving fwd the business of earthen construction. our core (validated) product is printing earthen acoustic barriers at ~4-5m3/hr. panels from loam are a great alternative to gypsum; due to the hygrothermic characteristics of earth the moisture content is stabilised (constant in a ~50-55% bandwidth) which is a massive advantage in view of traditional materials. and fully circular. I'm a developer of pythonocc and tesseract-nanobind, and take pleasure in augmenting my thinking with a dash of ai.
Re: The wonder of modern drywall
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
Got a link? This sounds handy.
Thermal Master P3: 25fps, 256x192, manual focus
Looks like it's improved even further - I'm seeing that model listed with 512x384 resolution, and it's $300 on Amazon.
Pretty incredible! I felt like I was getting an amazing deal when I paid about $1000 15 years ago for a FLIR E4 that I could flash into an E8. I might finally retire that in favour of one of these.
Re: The wonder of modern drywall
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thermal Master P3: 25fps, 256x192, manual focus
Looks like it's improved even further - I'm seeing that model listed with 512x384 resolution, and it's $300 on Amazon. Pretty incredible! I felt like I was getting an amazing deal when I paid about $1000 15 years ago for a FLIR E4 that I could flash into an E8. I might finally retire that in favour of one of these.
That's the software upscaled size, not the real resolution. Typical distortions of East Asian marketing.
Re: The wonder of modern drywall
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a while in the 90s, a friend from Canada went to Germany and started building NA style houses (wood frame, drywall) in Germany. People loved that it could be finished in 3 months instead of 9-12 and cost 1/3 less, IIRC.
They're happy until the long-term effects hit them, as stick frame houses need repairs a lot more often. Nowadays, European companies have developed many modular building techniques that have reduced the labor considerably, from robots that 3D-print concrete walls, to LEGO-like hollow bricks.
Ehhh I don’t know if this is really that true. Beyond painting the exterior it’s not like a stick frame is requiring constant rebuilding.
There are a lot of variables at play and I am not sure the answer is to build stone houses like in parts of Germany.