Big Lincoln logs. Cool.
Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
71–80 of 223 posts
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#72Note that the walls and interior floors are equally thick and as insulated as the roof. It is not a sensible or efficient use of materials, given how the physics of heat work. It is great, however, if your approach to construction was formed by playing Minecraft.
Not so. If you want high thermal performance in a building, insulation (therefore thickness) is crucial in the entire building envelope. As the beardier building retrofit types say, your house needs a hat (loft insulation) boots (floor insulation) and jacket (wall insulation).
Consider this: if you're raising the temperature of your floor to say, 25C, that won't do much if you're doing so on an uninsulated floor where the temperature of the ground beneath is 10C or so. UFH at that temperature is very efficient and thermally comfortable.
Consider further that you might then have walls which let all that lovely heat out even if your ceiling and floor are well insulated. It makes sense for them to be just as good, not least because your windows will in all likelihood be the worst part of the room in terms of insulation. Having as uniform a u-value across the room (and building) makes for uniform temperatures throughout. It lends itself to using heat pumps, further raising the efficiency of the building.
Further, lifetime emissions of the building are increasingly front loaded in construction as operational emissions drop. Standardising will presumably cut down on costs as well as emissions at that stage.
Building physics is an entire subject of its own and is worth studying. I'd suggest looking at the Association of Environmentally Conscious Builders and their CarbonLite course to learn more.
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#73I like the ethos but to me it's pointed in entirely the wrong direction. Why not just make standard sections of 2x4 or 2x6 framing? Start standardizing window sealing details? Literally anything that will actually get some use? Instead we get opensource plywood boxes?
Using plywood for all of the structural components means if you get a leak, which all houses get, you are in danger of much more significant damage than lumber framing. And with this system you still need to do all the normal things to build a house (get a designer, route plumbing, electrical, get a civil engineer, install all that stuff, etc.) just instead of framing you have custom blocks you need made.
I just don't think these make sense.
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#74They need to sell on the longevity and robustness of these homes. If the houses are crap, this is going to be an incredibly wasteful project no matter how many environmentally friendly indicators they point to.
There is at least some reason to believe we should make some types of buildings less robust. While there are many beautiful old homes, there is a bit of a bias when we think of older homes towards ones that have been kept up to date or remodeled many times in their lives. A large percentage of homes don’t go through this process and become blight. Japanese houses depreciate over a ~30 year cycle where, at the end of…
> Japanese houses depreciate over a ~30 year cycle where, at the end of that cycle, the only value left is in the land and the home is demolished and rebuilt.
The rejoinder to that being that most housing I've seen in Japan is of scandalously low quality.
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#75There's an episode of Grand Designs (great show) where some people build an entire house by bringing a CNC machine onsite and banging out pre-fab wall sections exactly like this and connecting them in place.
Here's the full episode: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6hsxwd
It's pretty cool to see, but in the end it seemed like way more effort than nailing some 2x4's together.
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#76Note that the walls and interior floors are equally thick and as insulated as the roof. It is not a sensible or efficient use of materials, given how the physics of heat work. It is great, however, if your approach to construction was formed by playing Minecraft.
Not sure where you got that from, but their product page states:
"WikiHouse Skylark blocks include a cavity for 250mm insulation in the walls, and 350mm insulation in the roof, giving exceptional levels of thermal insulation."
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#77Building technologies do need to evolve, but this ain't it. Starting with the tagline "Simple, beautiful zero-carbon building for everyone". WHAT? - Claiming that timber building products are carbon neutral is dubious, just talking about the timber alone, before any value added lifecycle. They should put some pictures of the Spruce forests their plywood comes from and let people decide for themselves. - Simple? Not r…
Why wouldn't raw timber be carbon neutral?
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#78Note that the walls and interior floors are equally thick and as insulated as the roof. It is not a sensible or efficient use of materials, given how the physics of heat work. It is great, however, if your approach to construction was formed by playing Minecraft.
It’s a pop-up so I can’t link to it, but their bit about interior walls shows them as thinner.
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
My rough estimate is around $4.75/sf for a high performance wall (drywall+2x6+osb+exterior foam ~ R31). They show £230/m2, so this product would be almost 7x more expensive.
In a stick built house you're paying a lot of labor. Material prices are not that much. For example, the material list for a 3 bedroom house is 130k. https://www.menards.com/main/building-materials/books-buildi... Say the land is 130k in your region. You won't find 3b houses for less than 360k. If you're looking at not so cheap builders, it will be 500k. I think there's a revolution coming in the way we build houses,…
For stick frame houses, around 10-15% of the cost is framing. Finishes account for the bulk of the cost.
Re: Wikihouse: Open-Source Houses
#80I love the idea of this. My wife and I watch a decent amount of Grand Designs are there are a few houses that experiment with the concept of cnc-cut block based assembly. I intend to build something like it someday (in the US, so it might be harder to find a manufacturer). One thing that strikes me as at odds is that they tout their reusability as well as the customization aspect of the block. It’s cnc cut so they’re…
A lot of basic structural building materials (bricks, framing timber, roof tiles, etc.) are already fairly reusable to an extent. It's just labour-intensive to do so, therefore we often don't. I'm not optimistic that prefabbed structural components would be much better.
Yeah as soon as someone gets a demolition bill as high as the construction bill, the desire to reuse everything will disappear quick.
This also presumes in 40-100 years when a house presumably makes sense to demolish, the same standard design is still considered good and the new owner has heard of your weird bespoke construction style.
Consider that currently the age of a house maybe worthy of demolition is 1978 and earlier at this point, and many many people refurbish and renovate houses significantly older than that.