101–110 of 454 posts
What is stopping homeowners from building these better homes today ?
Money
Builders themselves are slow to adopt new technology vs. do what they’ve always done. Part of that is because it’s hard to learn news things. Part of it is because new things have lots of unknown and builders shoulder that risk.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree on low humidity being bad, but your remark on insulation does not seem correct. I'm only familiar with cold climates, so perhaps I'm overlooking something, but mold needs moisture to grow, so it will appear where water condenses out of warm air on a cold surface. You can typically see this in windows. So you need to prevent cold surfaces. The best way to do that is improving the insulation. The reason you can…
It's not super intuitive at first, but its cold climates were this is actually a big issue. Water vapor "wants" to equalize from a more humid to less humid environment. So when it's cold out - the humidity can drop rather low. Then you take a shower and create water vapor - which flows into the walls, through the insulation, and condenses against the colder exterior. Open a wall in any stick frame house in the rocky…
When you've confused "per kWh cost" with "energy to the house delivery costs," this sort of stuff sounds good on paper, but it doesn't fundamentally solve the problem that in the winter, homes use a lot more energy than they can generate, and in the spring/fall, they will generate a lot more energy than they need. I've got a large ground mount solar install I put in a few years ago (15.9kW nameplate, though mostly ea…
When the price of power drops to zero in the spring/fall, you can be sure there will be plenty of people lapping it up to smelt aluminium, make glass, make steel, make cement, liquify air, make hydrogen, etc.
When the price of power is high in the winter, companies will swoop in with gas turbines, power cables from other places, and extra insulation to keep houses warm with lower energy costs. Entrepreneurs will see this coming, and will be there ready to provide power or power-saving measures to those who did not prepare.
As long as the market can set a price, the market will solve each problem. The people to lose out will be customers who don't adapt to keep their costs down - for example those who heat their 1960's uninsulated home with electric baseboard heaters.
There are already plenty of seasonal industries - like tourism. Power hungry industries will become seasonal or migratory too.
I think the government could create regulation to fix the incentives here. Something like allowing enhanced energy efficiency to be paid over time by creating a lien on the house that a new homeowner has to continue to make payments towards.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My system is grid tie, because the local plans review process and I didn't see eye-to-eye on batteries. I have a solar power trailer for backup power. https://www.sevarg.net/tag/solar2020/ documents the build. My frames are timber, though a neighbor built a very similar system with metal frames and 72 cell panels, and got his costs down quite a bit further - he's around $1/W installed, mine was somewhat higher at abo…
No welding is needed, you can use metal clamps to hold the pipes together. I have my panels on metal structure with no welding, I used bolts for joins.
As I understand NEC from talking to various people and reading quite a bit of it myself, someone else can do the frames for a homeowner installed solar project, but "rails and up" has to either be the homeowner or a licensed electrician, because the rails are typically considered part of the grounding system and therefore electrical work.
In any case, costs doing it yourself are far, far lower than paying someone else to do it. And ground mount is an awful lot nicer to work with than roof mount.
I just see this as another subsidy for single family housing developments. The home may be "zero energy ready" or whatever greenwashing term they want to use. But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments). All of this is…
> This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill. Look, I hate Single Family Housing as much as anyone - but roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes. If the people in the sticks are buying a lot of gas, they're paying a lot more taxes for the roads, too. It'd be nice if property t…
https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
I just see this as another subsidy for single family housing developments. The home may be "zero energy ready" or whatever greenwashing term they want to use. But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments). All of this is…
> This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill. Look, I hate Single Family Housing as much as anyone - but roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes. If the people in the sticks are buying a lot of gas, they're paying a lot more taxes for the roads, too. It'd be nice if property t…
Do you have any sources for that? I'm in Australia, where fuel costs about twice what it does in the US. A decent portion of that is taxes/duties, but road spending is taken from consolidated revenue, and fuel taxes ultimately contribute a minority of the spending on roads. So unless the cost of fuel production is massively lower in the US, something doesn't add up.
I just see this as another subsidy for single family housing developments. The home may be "zero energy ready" or whatever greenwashing term they want to use. But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments). All of this is…
> This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill. Look, I hate Single Family Housing as much as anyone - but roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes. If the people in the sticks are buying a lot of gas, they're paying a lot more taxes for the roads, too. It'd be nice if property t…
I just see this as another subsidy for single family housing developments. The home may be "zero energy ready" or whatever greenwashing term they want to use. But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments). All of this is…
> This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill. Look, I hate Single Family Housing as much as anyone - but roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes. If the people in the sticks are buying a lot of gas, they're paying a lot more taxes for the roads, too. It'd be nice if property t…
This is a common misunderstanding of how roads are funded. Roads are not solely funded by gas taxes and are predominantly paid for by funds raised from sources other than gas taxes.
I just see this as another subsidy for single family housing developments. The home may be "zero energy ready" or whatever greenwashing term they want to use. But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments). All of this is…
> This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill. Look, I hate Single Family Housing as much as anyone - but roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes. If the people in the sticks are buying a lot of gas, they're paying a lot more taxes for the roads, too. It'd be nice if property t…
I don't think that's true. Gasoline taxes aren't high enough to pay for roads.
https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/
It seems as of 2015, 50% of road related costs came out of general taxes. And as gas taxes have remained fairly constant, while roads have become more expensive to repair as they get worse, I can only think that number has gone up since then.