I wonder if building houses like deep freezers would be viable. Doors, windows all at about 2.5m so the cold air is trapped in the living space and any air loss is the hotter upper part when people leave the house.
Look at passive solar, it’s probably the easiest method for decreasing energy use. It often does call for thick walls and roofs with radiant barriers, but the underlying principle is taking advantage of the sun’s position changing throughout the year (provided you aren’t on the equator).
there are a thousand ways we could improve home design but homes aren’t optimized for efficiency they’re built to cost and they’re already unaffordable.
Yes and no. Yes they are built to be cheap and minimally code compliant but they are also way too fucking big. Most of the new construction I see is shitty ass mcmansions at 4k sqft and up with 5 bathrooms and 50 windows, when it could be 2800 sq ft to something close to passivhaus standards (PGH), all electric and very, very efficient for the same price. But somehow these asswipes needs a 5th bathroom to shit in so we are stuck with them optimizing construction to size and number of shitters, not efficiency. Unaffordability is a real issue but it’s a cop out to shitty oversized inefficient housing. We need to use the codes and tax structures to build smaller efficient homes, which will actually help affordability.
I wonder if building houses like deep freezers would be viable. Doors, windows all at about 2.5m so the cold air is trapped in the living space and any air loss is the hotter upper part when people leave the house.
Look at passive solar, it’s probably the easiest method for decreasing energy use. It often does call for thick walls and roofs with radiant barriers, but the underlying principle is taking advantage of the sun’s position changing throughout the year (provided you aren’t on the equator).
there are a thousand ways we could improve home design but homes aren’t optimized for efficiency they’re built to cost and they’re already unaffordable.
Yes and no. Yes they are built to be cheap and minimally code compliant but they are also way too fucking big. Most of the new construction I see is shitty ass mcmansions at 4k sqft and up with 5 bathrooms and 50 windows, when it could be 2800 sq ft to something close to passivhaus standards (PGH), all electric and very, very efficient for the same price. But somehow these asswipes needs a 5th bathroom to shit in so we are stuck with them optimizing construction to size and number of shitters, not efficiency. Unaffordability is a real issue but it’s a cop out to shitty oversized inefficient housing. We need to use the codes and tax structures to build smaller efficient homes, which will actually help affordability.