91–100 of 185 posts
Yep cheap energy and modern building techniques made us lose a lot of the common sense of yesterday. Good thing initiatives like the passive house institute are bringing back some of these principles, you can easily cut a modern home heating/cooling needs by 70%+ by following simples rules
Some highlights of this rubbish article > Pretty much all the fireplaces I see are also built on the central spine of the building, meaning not much heat would be lost to the windows or exterior wall. Or maybe because, as the first half of the article say, it is because the outside walls have nowhere to put a fireplace, because they are covered in windows? > he told me it can feel around 10C (18F) warmer inside on a…
The article takes a long view of time, stretching back to at least the founding of London, the capital city, two thousand and more years past on the banks of that very river.
There was a relatively short period of time when the Thames did freeze in winter and England was much colder, this article talks about a chunky bit of architecture during that period.
The windows are discussed wrt their thermal effects, allowing the sun in to heat central stone during the day on one side of the building, likely with heavy curtains at night, with windows blocked internally and largely for show on the rear.
Or go solar with a battery, or just have a massive battery hooked into your distribution panel and leave the 19th century heating hacks in the 19th century. Optimize what you need for today, not whatever was state of the art 200 years ago. An electric space heater running continuously is enough in an emergency.
Well that's full of really useful tips. I'll get the builders in to construct a 1.37m (4.5ft) thick spine through the middle of my house. Obviously.
I remember talking to a builder once who was building a house this way. He said the mass wasn't allowed to be advertised with an R-value since it wasn't actually insulation, but he said it was comparable to an R-50 house.
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.
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…
If you aren't using A/C and have the windows open, then it only helps, of course.
> 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…
30 degrees Centigrade is exceptional here.
Whereas in other parts of Europe it gets much hotter. Probably best not to generalise over a whole continent that covers 36 degrees of latitude (more than the contiguous 48 states of the US, at about 25 degrees), and goes from islands sat in the Gulf Stream to land sat next to an even larger land mass.
Well that's full of really useful tips. I'll get the builders in to construct a 1.37m (4.5ft) thick spine through the middle of my house. Obviously.
Modern insulation is really, really good, and modern heatpumps are very energy efficient and don't pollute your house with CO, CO2, and particulate matter like woodsmoke. Also, modern double- or triple-pane windows insulate much better than drafty Elizabethan windows. We live in a time of marvels.
All that is to say that builders cheap out on new home construction so most people don't get to enjoy the benefits if these innovations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I've been in an attic many times on a sunny day. The heat in the attic is well above what it is outside. I'm highly skeptical that an unvented attic is going to keep a house cool in summer.
While it’s true that the top side of above-attic insulation will be rather warmer than a vented attic on a hot sunny day, insulation on top of your attic also tends to work rather better than ceiling insulation. And there are plenty of other benefits to an unvented, insulated attic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, if you actually want to heat the house with fire you’ll want an insert or a wood stove. Otherwise most fireplaces in most houses are decorative, and one pays for that decoration with heat loss.
And even those will require draft from outside the insert / stove, so either you build them with an inlet from outside, you pull cold air from badly sealed doors / windows, or the chimney draft will be insufficient.