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My enthusiasm for the "future" peaks at "semi defrosted" WHERE Is The Vastly Improved Insulation This is yet another half-baked self-serving PR rich yadda. Given a choice between...
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I clearly recall reading about vacuum panels back in the 1960s. The idea was to mass produce the panels in something like 4 x 8 foot size and use them to build houses. Perhaps energy was too inexpensive to allow that idea to dominate. Now is the time!
We recently built a sun room addition on one end of our 50 year old house. We used 2x6 framing filled with insulation and triple glaze windows of course. I blew 2 to 3 feet of fibreglass insulation into the attiic. It made a very significant difference even though we don’t need air conditioning north of latitude 55. The 25% larger house used less heating energy than before!
It is common here to add an inch of foam insulation on the outside of houses. It doesn’t help dramatically unless steps are taken to stop convection losses in homes built before we got really careful about vapour barriers in the 1980s.
Sadly I have noticed that many environmental activists don’t do well with numbers. As in using 30 ton trucks to transport a ton or two of recycling materials hundreds of miles and some of it to Asia, never mind the cost in dollar or emission terms.
Talk about ventilation assisting refrigerator cooling systems - in climates with cold winters why aren’t fridges available with air in and out connections so we can cool with outside air already cooler than needed for the freezing compartment? Would you believe we use $20 000 worth of electricity every winter to cool the ice in our 4 sheet curling rink? The southern companies designing these cooling systems never thought of circulating the brine to a cooler outside the building!
How about clothes dryers that pump warm air out of houses, which then suck equal volumes of cold air in through furnace fresh air intakes and leaks in the vapour barrier. Dryers have an outlet pipe; why not an Inlet to connect to cold, dry outside air. When heated it’s humidity drops to zero making very efficient drying.
Thanks for this topic, Mex. Yes, we can keep our way of life while greatly reducing harmful emissions if we just build smarter.
Cement manufacturing produces enormous greenhouse gas emissions. It was in the news yesterday that they can be cut drastically while increasing the cement strength.
https://inhabitat.com/game-changing-graphene-reinforced-concrete-is-stronger-and-better-for-the-planet/
We recently built a sun room addition on one end of our 50 year old house. We used 2x6 framing filled with insulation and triple glaze windows of course. I blew 2 to 3 feet of fibreglass insulation into the attiic. It made a very significant difference even though we don’t need air conditioning north of latitude 55. The 25% larger house used less heating energy than before!
It is common here to add an inch of foam insulation on the outside of houses. It doesn’t help dramatically unless steps are taken to stop convection losses in homes built before we got really careful about vapour barriers in the 1980s.
Sadly I have noticed that many environmental activists don’t do well with numbers. As in using 30 ton trucks to transport a ton or two of recycling materials hundreds of miles and some of it to Asia, never mind the cost in dollar or emission terms.
Talk about ventilation assisting refrigerator cooling systems - in climates with cold winters why aren’t fridges available with air in and out connections so we can cool with outside air already cooler than needed for the freezing compartment? Would you believe we use $20 000 worth of electricity every winter to cool the ice in our 4 sheet curling rink? The southern companies designing these cooling systems never thought of circulating the brine to a cooler outside the building!
How about clothes dryers that pump warm air out of houses, which then suck equal volumes of cold air in through furnace fresh air intakes and leaks in the vapour barrier. Dryers have an outlet pipe; why not an Inlet to connect to cold, dry outside air. When heated it’s humidity drops to zero making very efficient drying.
Thanks for this topic, Mex. Yes, we can keep our way of life while greatly reducing harmful emissions if we just build smarter.
Cement manufacturing produces enormous greenhouse gas emissions. It was in the news yesterday that they can be cut drastically while increasing the cement strength.
https://inhabitat.com/game-changing-graphene-reinforced-concrete-is-stronger-and-better-for-the-planet/
