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An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm

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Re: An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm

#51

Post by idle_zealot »

rappatic wrote: post #50

> The house has lessons for how we can heat our homes more efficiently today The problem in Europe isn't keeping warm in the winter but keeping cool in the summer. In part thanks to their near-total lack of AC in residential buildings, Europe has an extremely high heat-related death rate. 200k people per year die of heatstroke in Europe: this accounts for 36% of global heat-related deaths. This is despite Europe bein…

Most of the tricks seem like they'd work in the cooling direction too. They amount to insulation and thermal mass. You would need AC to actually lower the temperature, but those improvements would let you run the cooling on a lower duty cycle.

Re: An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm

#52

Post by realusername »

ynac wrote: post #10

When we lost power for 10 days a few winters back we attempted to use the fire place for heat. It was a fail. Post and beam house (large wide open floor plan) with a large transfer from 1st to 2nd floor, and apprently my lack of skill for optimizing heat over beauty in the fireplace, left us without much of a thermal bump. To this day I swear we were pulling heat out of the chimney faster than we were heating the hou…

It's pretty much 10 to 20% efficiency for an open chimney and 80% for a good wood stove so your result isn't surprising.

Open floor plans also destroy the efficiency as the heat goes up which made your already inefficient heating even worse.

Combine both together and you probably have 5% efficiency.

Re: An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm

#53

Post by chao- »

rappatic wrote: post #50

> The house has lessons for how we can heat our homes more efficiently today The problem in Europe isn't keeping warm in the winter but keeping cool in the summer. In part thanks to their near-total lack of AC in residential buildings, Europe has an extremely high heat-related death rate. 200k people per year die of heatstroke in Europe: this accounts for 36% of global heat-related deaths. This is despite Europe bein…

Even parts of the US that have AC standard have learned to lean on it so hard that they've lost architectural features which, 50-100 years ago, kept a house cooler in Summer.

I once lived in a rental house in a "historical" neighborhood (on US timelines, not European) in a big city, and most of the houses had porches on two or three sides, depending on the cardinal orientation. These kept sunlight from falling directly on main body of the house, and strategically placed windows let you open two or three and get a breeze through the whole house.

We learned this visiting a neighbor who owned their home. The rental was not as well-maintained: some of the window frames had been painted shut over decades of touchups, but we never thought much of it. The day we jimmied them open and experienced a true cross-breeze through the living room was a HUGE "Aha!" moment.

Setting aside porches, even simple features like awnings above windows (esp. second-story windows) have fallen out of fashion, but they can reduce the demand on indoor AC significantly. They save money, but people think they look old-fashioned or something like that.

Re: An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm

#54

Post by themaninthedark »

quesera wrote: post #31
crazygringo wrote: post #20

It's an interesting article on this one particular mansion, but the idea that "the same tricks for more efficient heating can be used in modern designs" seems pretty silly. We don't use fireplaces anymore (a major "trick" being to put them in the middle of the house rather than in the exterior walls), and while using large windows to capture sunlight and heat works great in the winter, it also leads to overheating in…

It's not like the wisdom is lost , it's just ignored in modern builds. All architects think about siting and solar exposure. But the builders are in charge, and they optimize for what the market responds to -- which does not always include factors like these which contribute to long-term comfort and livability. So I would say that consumers could learn a thing or two. That said, most buyers are not buying newly-built…

Even when the buyer is buying a newly built house, it's often already built or being built off of already existing plans that do not take these things into account.

Re: An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm

#55

Post by quickthrowman »

xnx wrote: post #4

> Fireplaces were strategically arranged so minimal heat would be lost to the outer walls I'm always a little confused by radiators placed underneath windows in modern buildings. I'm sure it evens out cold spots, but it sends a lot of heat right outside.

Offices that use air handlers and VAVs also have narrow VAV zones along all perimeter windows. It’s for comfort, windows are where the most heat is lost/gained so heating or cooling those zones makes the space more comfortable for the people inside those areas.

Re: An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm

#57

Post by maccard »

ynac wrote: post #10

When we lost power for 10 days a few winters back we attempted to use the fire place for heat. It was a fail. Post and beam house (large wide open floor plan) with a large transfer from 1st to 2nd floor, and apprently my lack of skill for optimizing heat over beauty in the fireplace, left us without much of a thermal bump. To this day I swear we were pulling heat out of the chimney faster than we were heating the hou…

An open fire is not a particularly warm thing to have unless you’re directly in front of it. Most of the heat goes straight up the flue, and it uses an enormous amount of air to keep burning - it will pull huge volumes from rvertwhere it can. This is why these old buildings didn’t suffer from damp issues - the open fires burning were ventilating them.

Re: An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm

#58

Post by amluto »

WalterBright wrote: post #44
crazygringo wrote: post #20

It's an interesting article on this one particular mansion, but the idea that "the same tricks for more efficient heating can be used in modern designs" seems pretty silly. We don't use fireplaces anymore (a major "trick" being to put them in the middle of the house rather than in the exterior walls), and while using large windows to capture sunlight and heat works great in the winter, it also leads to overheating in…

> Everyone I know who has built a house has thought very much about sun, season and temperature. I've lived in houses that certainly did not take into account sun, season and temperature. I learned a lot from that experience. My current house is optimized for it. I've learned a few more things about it, and could do better. > the idea that it has something to teach modern architects and builders is pure fantasy Not m…

> For example, how many houses have a cupola? They're common on older homes, but non-existent on modern ones. What the roof does is accelerate the wind moving over the roof, then the air vents in the cupola let the wind through, which sucks the heat out of the attic.

This one is genuinely obsolete. With modern techniques, it’s straightforward to build a reliable unvented attic, and there are few if any climates where a vented attic makes sense. There are plenty of climates where a vented attic, even a nice one with a cupola, is massively inferior to an unvented, conditioned attic.

Seal and condition your attic. Put on a decorative cupola if you like. If you live in a place with heavy snow load, you vent a small gap between the top of your attic and your roof surface to help keep the actual roof surface cold enough to avoid melting the snow.

Re: An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm

#60

Post by foobarian »

8jef wrote: post #34
dyauspitr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah fireplaces don’t make sense to me. Hot air rises and it sucks the existing heated air in the house which all flows out. The only way to heat the space is you need something with a lot of thermal mass that heats up in the process and then radiates heat. So a lot of bricks around the fire, some sort of baffle to enable the heat transfer and a system that sucks in air from the outside.

What you imagine is called a rocket stove mass heater, and it has other names too. Works wonderfully well.

We saw stoves/fireplaces like this in a bunch of taverns in Slovenia. Huge hulking tiled cubes around the center of the building that just radiated a pleasant heat from every square inch of the surface. I imagine it was quite efficient, with just a very low fire burning to keep it in equilibrium.
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