Classic market failure: operational costs don't factor into home buying decisions prominently, so whatever small added construction cost is borne by the homebuilders (the cost of added insulation doesn't quite result in an equal increase of selling price).
Short of instituting a carbon tax that would make operational costs of heating suddenly more prominent and priced accordingly, this is a great case for efficiency standards in homebuilding. Suppose your home came with an "energy star" HVAC rating...
https://www.energystar.gov/newhomes
Some states have even offered tax credits for doing so.
I'd love to install a ground heat pump but the installation requires digging up our fairly newly made garden. We'll move in a few years and buy something which has an A label with a pump and panels.
It also gives you an estimate of the amount Energy used to heat/cool your dwelling as well as the average yearly cost.
Obviously, this system is not perfect but its something.
Based on that you can work out if buying a cheaper and less insulated place is actually worth it or not.
You can argue all you want that it SHOULD be enough to share lifetime costs, but it doesn’t work. Just look at people who still buy incandescent light bulbs because they are cheaper at the cash register, even though they will save a multiple of the cost of the bulb over its lifetime.
We as consumers seem to ignore or discount future pain for lower prices now, which is why operating costs are ignored by average consumer if they mean higher upfront costs. And when marketers try to bring future savings into the present and get you thinking in terms of total cost of ownership, even the rational-types at HN cry "dark pattern!"
All of this is to say we haven't yet found how to make "it's cheaper to live in" an effective message.
Solar folks are getting there, though ("the system pays for itself in 5-7 years"), and with the rise of EV's, I think this reasoning will become more common.
The "dark pattern" complaint is that actual realized savings (tax credits) are mixed with hypothetical savings (future cost of gasoline) and taken off of the sales price. Meanwhile, things like delivery fees, sales taxes and maintenance cost differences are not added back in.
It's one part standard marketing, one part underhanded marketing imho.
> And when marketers try to bring future savings into the present and get you thinking in terms of total cost of ownership,
That's because it is fundamentally inaccurate, and therefor counter-productive. I'm all for demonstrating TCO differences, but when you show a "price" of $26k and the actual price is over $40k with taxes and everything added back in, suddenly you get struck with a bit of cognative dissonance.
Basically, moisture control and insulation is a tough problem. In modern houses the solution is to have an airtight layer of plastic sheeting between the insulation and drywall, but those houses should also have been designed from the ground up to have an active, mechanical ventilation system.
Based on experiences here in Finland, a lot of such buildings built in the 60's and 70's have developed severe problems, and frankly even new projects seem to have issues all the time. The more you insulate, the more you have to take care that moisture does not gather in the insulation because you no longer have airflow that would dry it out.
In a building that will be air conditioned, putting plastic sheeting between the insulation and drywall is a bad idea. The problem is that any moisture in the (comparatively warmer) insulation cavity will condense on the (comparatively cooler) plastic sheeting, wetting out the insulation and causing mold and rot. They also prevent the wall from drying to the inside.
It works fine in cold climates that are do not install air conditioning, as I assume is the case in Finland. In the majority of the US, even up to the Canadian border, many new houses have AC.
https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/digests/bsd-106-un...
I can only hope 2x6 framing becomes more common, the subslab insulation has started to become code.
Based on your experiences what do you recommend? (or what sources do you recommend consulting to learn more about retrofitting older buildings?)
Counter-intuitively, air sealing is usually the #1 improvement. A good audit with thermal scans is worthwhile, especially if your muni offers a subsidized audit.
Tough to go into more detail without a little more information.
I think the hard thing for people to think about is that heat transfer is exponential. But we don't measure it that way. In fact R values are really misleading[1].
Meaning transfer coefficients can vary by orders of magnitude. So it's easy for one source like air leakage to totally swamp every other source.
[1] Figure of merit is really 1/R (smaller is better) not R.
> Tough to go into more detail without a little more information.
Have a ~1800 square foot single family Colonial located in Northeast USA built around 1910. It was partially renovated ~2000 but most of it's still uninsulated (afaict, still very new to this!).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/702735/household-natural...
Edit: e.g. googling brought up this article - https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/buildings/airtightness-b...
https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-001-t...
People are grossed out by rodents and a leaky roof has to be addressed, but if their heating/cooling cost goes up slightly because a cable installer messed up are they going to hire someone to hook up a blower door, patch things up, and charge this back to the cable company?
There really is just a severe lack of building science education in American construction, because the margins are so thin and it is still dominated by blue collar "man in a van" companies. So you have boneheaded contractors drilling holes into air barriers because that's how it's always been done.
Heat conduction through studs in an insulated wall also carries sound. A 2x6 plate wall with 2x4 studs on alternating faces (think slalom) helps with both.
Fortunately this was part of a project to finish my home office, so I still had access to the space between the internal and external walls. Not only could I see the insulation damage, I could also repair it without too much effort.
But in general, I agree there's a responsibility gap when it comes to these installers. I think the best practical solution for now is to factor into such projects the cost of restoring a building's thermal envelope.
EDIT: I should mention that a blower-door test might not have detected this damage. The cavity whose insulation was damaged has pretty good draft-blockage from the rest of the house, due to fire-code requirements.
What, $5 for a tube of exterior grade caulk? Vapor barrier seal tape is 10 cents a foot. Add in $10 in labor per penetration and you're done.
You could leave it out of your estimate entirely and not even notice if your guys did the work.
edit: I'm a commericial construction estimator
I agree that restoring an air seal is trivial on a per-hole basis. My main point was restoring the lost insulation performance that comes from trashing one stud cavity of fiberglass batt insulation when the hole is made.
Based on my limited knowledge, I don't know what impact that might have on the overall structure's thermal efficiency. I would also worry about risk to any water-carrying pipes running through such a section in a cold climate.
In the Midwest there is an utter catastrophe where modern high efficiency houses are rotting away because construction and design errors let water in or water to condense with no way out.
We've only been hearing about how well Sweden and other Nordics do insulation, community heating, heat pumps etc for about 40 or 50 years. Various combined heat and power, insulation, passive houses etc would turn up on things like Tomorrow's World (60s-90s technology TV series) fairly often, like it was some sort of breakthrough new discovery. Well it was, to the UK, I guess.
"Hey, do you know why the English put their pipes on the outside of their houses?"
"No?"
"It's so they can reach them easier to thaw them when they freeze!"
And then everyone laughs.
...and then you learn that it's not a joke, and then you cry.
Ventiliation is shit, one side never gets the sun so the outer wall is cold which means condensation is a daily battle, I basically run a big heavy duty dehumidifier from mid-autumn to mid-spring (at least its not a net loss, it dumbs a fair amount of heat as a byproduct so I can run the heaters less).
It's rented though so not something I can fix until I buy a property in a few years.
You can change out your furnace/AC/Heat Pump anytime, but try tearing off all the drywall in your entire house to replace the fiberglass insulation that doesn't work or was installed incorrectly. Spray Foam Insulation pays for itself and to think it's only around $3.00 a sq/ft at 3 " thick installed. People have no problem paying more for carpeting or tile floors, strange....
When it runs, you can never set it higher than 2 degrees F above the current temperature and if you do that when it's even close to freezing outside the unit will build up a think layer of ice around the casing...which just makes it spin constantly until we turn it off to go manually de-ice it. It's the most hated piece of equipment in my entire home.
Do you have a reference for one of these more effective modern heat pumps? I've been sincerely planning to install geothermal when this thing dies.
Heat pumps work best when you maintain a room at a stable, comfortable temperature.
Right, but for this to be economical, you need to have a well-insulated house, which is pretty much impossible to retrofit. So practically speaking, only newly build houses (and then, only those to the highest energy standards) should use heat pumps for heating. If we go around promoting them for other purposes, they will build up a reputation for being a crappy solution and people will shy away from them. That's my main problem with people promoting them - they often promote them for retrofits.
It is a complicated system -- lots of valves and reservoirs and so on, but very efficient and doesn't need much maintenance.
In a dense urban setting, you can heat homes with water heated at the local power plant, either fossil or nuclear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogeneration
I don’t think they’ve bothered to calculate the effects of pumping warmer water into everyone’s air conditioned home...
Here are some calculations suggesting that the numbers simply don't add up for ground-source heat pumps at urban population densities: https://www.withouthotair.com/c21/page_152.shtml
No need to muck around with fins in the sewage, or trying to convert to electricty, simply heating the incoming water a degree or two saves energy for your water heater.
In Norway most pumps are Toshiba and Mitsubishi. F.ex Mitsubishi FH35.
I'm joining you in that. I'm in Dubai at the moment thanks to airspace closure over Pakistan.
I noticed that richer Middle Eastern countries are the few places outside of the ex-USSR where foamed concrete picked up popularity as an insulation material. Seems to be a very popular choice for detached housing here.
I also noticed that despite the fabulous wealth, glass curtainwalls are not so widespread here. Even the most "skyscrapery" skyscrapers here have some solid walls and/or external shading (even Burj Khalifa on some levels.)
My exposure to the Nordics is limited but in the pictures I’ve seen there were lots of wood single family houses.
I think relative cost of timber is a bigger factor than you might think - the US has endless forests, while the UK came quite close to deforestation round about WW1 (earlier in Scotland). Traditional Scottish cottage construction had essentially only one structural timber piece - the roof beam. That was the most difficult part to source.
There is also a mentality of homes being forever. My house was built originally in 1870 and that's not particularly old. In the US old homes (except perhaps in a few stylish old areas) are something which need torn down and rebuilt.
I don't really understand where this belief arises from. Most homes in the US are built on undeveloped land. It's not typical to tear down an existing house to build a new one.
To the extent that it happens, it's generally because an area is essentially undergoing redevelopment. i.e. a rural area is being consumed by an urban city. In cases like that, the purpose is to increase density. It's pretty rare to tear down a single family home just to construct an equivalent but newer one on the property.
To the extent that teardowns are more common in the US than the UK, I imagine it's driven mostly by the ability to massively upgrade in the process. If you live in a 150-year-old stone house in the UK that's been updated over the years so that it's got modern electrical and plumbing and already maxes out your square footage (meterage?), what would you gain by tearing down except a lot more debt and some better insulation? With that said, I think this math generally doesn't work out for Americans, either, who generally trade up homes rather than rebuild.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/cities/2017...
If done right, it is likely the most durable material to use for siding. Will last for hundreds of years. Same with bricks if well maintained.
All other kinds of siding deteriorate quickly in comparison.
I am keeping an eye on the new cement siding that's now on the market, that's very interesting.
https://www.bgs.ac.uk/discoveringgeology/hazards/earthquakes...
The British Geological Society lists "Significant Earthquakes since 1932" and there are twelve, but they're dated 1580, 1816, 1880, 1884, 1896, 1931, 1984, 1990, 2002, 2008, 1974, 1979. Three are offshore, three in the Scottish Highlands.
But wood in the UK was in demand by the Royal Navy, to the point where they depended on imported oak from the Baltics, forest cover in the (small) UK was down to 5% around the turn of 1900.
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2013/jul/27/history-of-en... and a skim-read of the start of http://www.wou.edu/history/files/2015/08/Melby-Patrick.pdf
I wouldn't be surprised if the advantages of stone in the UK were/are availability until it became the default.
Mindful of how flames [Great Fire of London] had destroyed a third of the largely wooden city, building with timber frames was banned in the years after Sir Christopher Wren's 1667 Building Act. [..] until 1999
Ah, probably a lot of that involved.
On the west coast of Canada we'd probably never hit -20, but lots of other parts of the country do regularly.
In northern Sweden you can’t be surprised to see a month of -20 some years, so you probably want either a bigger heat pump, expect to use more direct electric in the pump (the heat pumps are air/water so the houses are heated with circulating water, not hot air) or something else entirely like geothermal.
Also worth mentioning is that Sweden pushes a lot of retrofitting of older houses, not just new ones. In the 90's, triple-pane windows became a legally mandated standard, so every old apartment building that only had double-pane windows had to add a third pane somehow, or change out all the windows or whatever.
A lot of older buildings are also adding extra insulation, one complex I used to live in that was built in the 1940's did that after I moved out. They stripped off all the outer layers to get to the brick, added foam insulation blocks, and redid the plaster finish.
When I lived there, the complex did the mandatory energy certification and got a shit score, so that's why they had to do it.
I do wonder how X's technology compares to existing household products, though.
Then he complains about the heating bill and blames me for it (because I cranked the heat when I came over for dinner one night). What a mystery.
p.s. even though the refrigerants are bad, still a mile better than the old oil heaters everybody used when I was a kid
I'm guessing here. I just know that the outside condenser and inside evaporator (in a cooling setup) need to match each other pretty well to avoid damage to the compressor or inefficient operation.
I'm sure there are heat pumps that don't cool well when the temperature is too high, but I don't think it's a general property of all of them.
For what size house, if I might ask?
Nitpick / clarification: this is not 'EPS' which is what is commonly known in the US a styrofoam (although according to Wikipedia, the trademarked name 'Styrofoam' actually referes to XPS); so not the white grainy stuff e.g. some disposable coffee cups are made from. Modern insulation is done with PIR, PUR or XPS.
Whenever this topic appears on HN I want to get on my soapbox and yell "INSULATION PEOPLE, INSULATION!". Most houses I've seen outside of the Nordics have shit-all insulation and that's depsite it working both ways - house stays cooler in the summer. It's such a small cost to add during construction and it pays off in a year or two, tops.
Modern, newly built houses in Sweden, way above the arctic circle, require less than 5000 kWh per year to heat and generate hotwater.