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Zero energy ready homes are coming

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Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#351

Post by aaronblohowiak »

Syonyk wrote: post #77
jrs235 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if instead of batteries you hooked up a boiler to heat water or a deep chest freezer to cool water and then used heat exchangers to heat or cool overnight when solar doesn't work? I'm assuming no one does this because batteries are likely cheaper than this type of setup.

You're welcome to do that, and it's something some off grid systems use, but the energy storage in that sort of thing is fairly poor. Go do the math on it, but you'll find a 55 gallon drum of water, from "room temperature" to "really darn hot" holds 15-20kWh of energy. It's useful, but not a staggeringly large amount for a typical house, that can easily use more than that on a single day's heating. Thermal mass stora…

The ground is massive and digging a trench can be done.. those systems for storing heat seem to be gaining some traction

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#352

Post by akira2501 »

paiute wrote: post #47

Those dehumidifiers make these places uninhabitable for me. Constant low humidity is really unhealthy. Without them these ultra insulated homes have major vapor and mold issues. Being highly insulated is good but at a point it's just silly. I'd rather see efforts to insulate old trailers, manufactured homes, etc. Rich people experimenting with zero energy homes don't need a credit.

That's part of what bothers me when they combine residential and commercial use into a single figure, and then put all the onus on making homes as energy efficient as possible while entirely overlooking one of the major functional purposes of a home: to provide comfort.

It's a daffy one-sided approach that is unsustainable.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#353

Post by coding123 »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #337
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The yard isn't necessarily there to be used in the way you mean. Often the yard is a buffer between you and your neighbor. Your noisy neighbor who smokes, swears, and plays the most disagreeable music at the highest volume late into the night. Any distance is helpful. My big problem with cities is the people.

I don't mind city life for the most part, except for the whole thing with most apartment complexes being built of cardboard, which means that every single thing your upstairs neighbor and many of the things your adjacent neighbors are doing can be heard loud and clear, and this problem plagues even newer construction. And then you have people on the street yelling, vehicles modified to be as loud as possible driving…

This. I see so many people say, build vertical, density. Then when 80% of the people explain that everyone is fucking noisy, the vertical people don't reply.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#354

Post by chongli »

js8 wrote: post #341
Xeoncross wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is going to be a lot of health fallout though as people start having oxygen depletion from tightly-sealed houses. It's important that even well sealed homes have both A/C fresh air sources as well as ERV/HRV systems that can recapture the heat/cold the house has while replacing the CO2 with outside air.

Maybe put in some plants?

You'd have to put so many plants in your house that the interior would look like one of those rainforest exhibits at the natural history museum. A couple of houseplants on the windowsill won't even move the needle on CO2 levels in a house occupied by a family.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#355

Post by stouset »

elbigbad wrote: post #346
stouset wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many sources would you like? Of course it’s not going to be on the same order as literally dumping raw sewage into the surrounding area. But there is an enormous body of research demonstrating the overall drain of resources from economically-productive urban areas out to costly suburban ones. Then there’s the carbon cost of enormous, congested highways and stroads where people idle in traffic for hours of their d…

I would, personally, love to read at least one source. Which you didn’t even provide for some reason. And I mean that, I would happily read any source you provide, with a preference for more academic sources.

One it is. Link to original academic source is in the first sentence.

https://cayimby.org/sprawl-costs-the-u-s-1-trillion-every-ye...

Actually I’m an overachiever. Let’s do two! Direct academic reference.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3325575

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#356

Post by twblalock »

bandofthehawk wrote: post #349
twblalock wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We quite literally have the power to influence that instead of just throwing our hands up and saying "well gosh Americans want terribly designed communities whose long-term costs are completely unsustainable, so I guess there's nothing we can do about it." That's quite a strawman there. Suburbs are not inherently unsustainable or terribly designed. Some are, but some cities are too. I'm seeing a ton of strawman arg…

> Suburbs are not inherently unsustainable or terribly designed. Some are, but some cities are too. I would guess that most suburbs are financially unsustainable in the long term because they pay less in taxes than it costs to maintain their infrastructure. Strong towns talks about this in great detail.

> I would guess that most suburbs are financially unsustainable in the long term because they pay less in taxes than it costs to maintain their infrastructure.

Again, that is something that might be true for some places but not others.

I know of suburbs that definitely pay for themselves. And it's not hard to see why -- the property taxes are high and many of the residents are paying high income taxes too. Plus, many residents of suburbs commute to work in cities, where they contribute to the success of businesses that pay taxes in those cities.

I also know that some of the new subdivisions outside of Sacramento have paid for all of their infrastructure via their HOA, so that all of the money to build and maintain the roads, sewers, and power lines was 100% paid for by the homeowners. That's also apparently a common model for new housing in Nevada.

These arguments about taxes are also a form of special pleading that we don't see much of in other debates. Taxes are redistribution. Quite a lot of people and organizations get more in benefits from the government than they pay for, e.g. welfare recipients and students getting grants, companies get subsidies, state governments move money around to pay for schools, etc. Nobody seriously argues that the police and fire departments should only serve people who pay income tax, or that people without children shouldn't be taxed to pay for schools. Yet for some reason people seem to think that suburbs should have a unique requirement to pay for themselves 100% and can't be sustained if they don't.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#357

Post by bandofthehawk »

johnweldon wrote: post #297
stouset wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone preferring to live in a suburb does not mean they're generating externalities at that level. They are, but those externalities are simply not as straightforwardly obvious.

Do you have any references for this statement. I'm not arguing there are no externalities (there are externalities in just about every choice we make). I just haven't been convinced that there are common egregious externalities at the level of dumping raw sewage into the creek.

Are you looking for references that dense population areas subsidize the less dense areas? Strong towns has lots of examples, here's one: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/9/the-real-reason...

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#358

Post by jesseendahl »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #323
boulos wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My understanding is passive house comes from a German project. It shouldn't surprise anyone that strategies which work well in Germany differ from strategies that work in warmer climates. It actually started in North America around the time of the oil embargo as a mechanism to reduce energy costs. (See the history section of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house ). Once that shock passed, people went back t…

Your own source indicates it was being called passive solar energy design in the 1970s and indicates Passivhaus Institut was founded in Germany in 1996. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passivhaus-Institut As someone who has followed such things for decades, it is my personal recollection that this German project is the root source of the expression Passive House. Most passivhaus buildings are in Germany and Austria a…

If you Google “passive solar vs. passivhaus” you will find a lot of results.

This one is the first result which explains the difference in terms: https://www.whitepebbleinteriors.com.au/the-difference-betwe...

I believe passivhaus as a term did originally arise/derive from solar house, but since then the terms have come to mean very different things. I wouldn’t say that solar house is still considered an umbrella term for passivhaus nowadays.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#359

Post by DoreenMichele »

jesseendahl wrote: post #358
DoreenMichele wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your own source indicates it was being called passive solar energy design in the 1970s and indicates Passivhaus Institut was founded in Germany in 1996. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passivhaus-Institut As someone who has followed such things for decades, it is my personal recollection that this German project is the root source of the expression Passive House. Most passivhaus buildings are in Germany and Austria a…

If you Google “passive solar vs. passivhaus” you will find a lot of results. This one is the first result which explains the difference in terms: https://www.whitepebbleinteriors.com.au/the-difference-betwe... I believe passivhaus as a term did originally arise/derive from solar house, but since then the terms have come to mean very different things. I wouldn’t say that solar house is still considered an umbrella ter…

I did exactly that and provided a link to a source in an earlier comment.

I wanted to be a translator at one time. I've had Intro to Linguistics as a college class.

I genuinely have zero problem with people wanting to use the term passive house to refer to a distinct set of building techniques and passive solar to refer to a different set of building techniques. Living languages evolve. It's a known phenomenon.

And, yet, so far no one has suggested to me a better umbrella term than passive solar design.

I defined the term thusly in one of my comments here:

Passive solar design is about creating a home which needs little energy to stay at a comfortable temperature.

My best understanding of life, the universe and everything is that without energy from the sun, earth would be extremely cold. And also wind energy is a form of solar energy which arises from air movement caused by temperature differences.

So to my mind, any technique that tries to keep a home a comfortable temp using sunlight to warm it and air flow to cool it with a minimum of electricity, oil, and other energy sources is using passive solar. It's trying to primarily use energy from the sun in a passive fashion by means of elegant design suited to the local climate conditions.

I guess I need to start defining my terms up front on HN for this topic because I do understand why people want to make this distinction in building techniques, yet I still need an umbrella term for this and I don't currently know of a superior umbrella term to the one I'm currently using.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#360

Post by ricktdotorg »

jjav wrote: post #250
lotsofpulp wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have to cross a 40ft+ road with vehicles traveling at 50mph (i.e. 40mph speed limit), I consider that not walkable. And 5 lane 40mph arterial roads (two each way and 1 turn lane), seems to be a standard feature of all suburbs all around the country, on which most grocery stores and shopping are located.

> If you have to cross a 40ft+ road with vehicles traveling at 50mph (i.e. 40mph speed limit), I consider that not walkable. Ok, but that's a quite radical limitation to the definition of walkable. What is the reason to put up self-imposed limitations like that? I mean, by that definition even most of Manhattan wouldn't be called walkable even thought it's the most walkable city in the US! In my very suburban neighbo…

> In my very suburban neighborhood, I can very easily walk to a 24hr supermarket in about 5-6 minutes, so I often do

some anecdata as a counterpoint to the "everything being super close to you in urban areas" narrative: i live in a pretty damn urban neighourhood ("old" or "core" Hollywood, CA), and it takes me ~15 minutes to walk to the nearest supermarket (just under 1 mile).

historically, there were a number of closer supermarkets but those large buildings & their parking lots tend to be eventually razed and replaced with luxury apartment buildings.

huh, actually i just checked and it looks like there is not a single 24-hour supermarket within any kind of reasonable walking distance of my home (2-3 miles). i am pretty sure the local VONS was 24hr before COVID, i wonder if that is why? now all the local VONS or Ralphs or what have you all close between 11pm and 1am.

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