I had lunch yesterday with a friend who buys old city buildings and renovates them, mostly for commercial use. He's become as interested in peak oil as I am. He was telling me that he'd just acquired an old apartment building that he was planning to renovate and retrofit for a time when we will not be able to use air conditioning much. He's going to put in sleeping porches, and design the ventilation to make maximum use of ceiling fans and drafts. I told him I'd buy a place in such a building.
My own house was built in 1914, for a time before air conditioning existed, and if it weren't for safety concerns preventing us from opening the extensive and smartly designed windows, we'd be able to cut back a lot on our a/c use by getting cross-breezes going. If it comes to it, I should be able to spend some money getting our house restored to a condition where those windows become operable without compromising our security. Our old house will be a lot easier to retrofit for a post-carbon future than most of the housing stock in our area, which would be pretty much uninhabitable for much of the year without air conditioning.
Indeed, one wonders how economically feasible it will be to operate skyscrapers in an era of $300+ per barrel oil. Will we see the depopulation of cities, and entire regions? Will the Sunbelt be untenable for many people? Obviously one can live without a/c, or much a/c, here, because people did. But frankly, I hate the heat so much that if a/c became a practical impossibility, I'd be strongly inclined to up and move north.
If I were going to build a new house right now, I'd be looking at models from the pre-a/c days, assuming that a/c was not going to be available in a few years. You? I vaguely remember my grandmother's little old 1937 house, which was not air conditioned, but which was pretty cool. She and my grandfather put a window unit in the living room at some point, which was great because it meant that one room of the house was a refuge from the oppressive heat, but didn't require cooling the entire place.
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As the authors of Natural Capitalism argue, the housing industry (like all other industries) has barely even begun to pick the low-hanging fruit of energy conservation. It takes extremely high energy prices to overcome the inertia and path dependency.
No kidding. It's somewhat absurd, actually. I can't count the number of houses without correctly designed attics. You've all lived in them...houses with attics so hot you can't go up there in the summer, yet cool in the winter. Um...that's backwards. Attics should be only slightly hotter than outside in the summer, and as hot as possible in the winter, which they would be if the thermostats and vents on them were built correctly.
I mean, that's not some sort of fancy new material or expensive solar panels, that's a temperature sensor and a IC to average the daily temperature and figure out if it's summer or winter. We could do it dumbly for decades, we can do it smartly now, and we don't.
Personal environmentalism is a crock. I refuse to spend hours of my time to get a fraction of the result that a tiny bit of planning, in companies that sell us products, would get. I'll install solar panels when companies stop designing electric razors with wall wart chargers that use as much power as a solar panel would provide when the razor isn't even plugged in, and then selling that to millions of people, when they could install a 7 cent sensor that would flip the thing off. (Seriously. Go feel your wall warts and see hot they are sometimes, even when the device is off. Now unplug the device, wait a bit, and see if they're still hot. Half of them will be!)
Well, I mean, I'll do it if it saves money, but I'm not doing it out of an obligation or anything. I don't have an obligation not to walk on the grass if other people are driving tanks over it, no matter what the sign asks me to do.
And, no, rising energy costs won't help, because most people have no idea where their energy is going. I know everyone here will disagree with me, but this is where we need legislation, at least labeling. All electronic devices sold should have average watt hours used, when both off and on, printed on them, both on the label and on the device. If you look, you'll notice we already have such a label on electronic devices, except it only lists wattage, which you can't extrapolate watt hours from. (Because that wattage is peak use, so it might just need it when turning on.)
Peggy,
Sorry but hot-water heat isn't more efficient. Every time you transfer heat from one substance to another, you lose. So, heating the water which heats the metal which heats the air is less efficent than heating the air and blowing it in to the room. It is more comfortable however.
Sorry but hot-water heat isn't more efficient. Every time you transfer heat from one substance to another, you lose. So, heating the water which heats the metal which heats the air is less efficent than heating the air and blowing it in to the room. It is more comfortable however.
This obscures the difference between radiant heat and convection. It really depends on where you're getting the heat and how that heat is transmitted to humans. Compare two ways to heat a given living space. Electrical heat obtained by heating a resistive filament and blowing air across it. The electricity comes from a dirty coal plant miles away. On average, 8% of the electricity was lost in the transmission lines between the heater and the coal plant. Air is an extremely poor conductor of heat, compared to water and most metals.
Now consider a radiant floor using water heated directly by solar collectors on the roof (or even augmented by gas or electric water heaters.) There are no fans or blowers involved, but pumps to cycle the water through the radiant coils. And radiant heat, as anyone knows who has been warmed directly by the sun's rays on a cold winter's day, is much more pleasant than having dehumidified hot air blown in your face.
Basically, when it comes to specific applications of warming humans in a given space, you can't make blanket statements - no pun intended - like "hot-water heat isn't more efficient."
Bob,
You confuse the issue by introducing the source of energy. OK, if you can use solar, that's maybe cheaper and if it works better with thermal heat then you've got a point. (maintenance of active solar aside where if designed correctly which is difficult passive solar would likely be more efficient). IOW you need to compare apples and apples. You mention comfort and I'd already agreed that radiant water heat is much more pleasant. But, you do not address the basic thermodynamics and ya can't fool mother nature.
But, you do not address the basic thermodynamics and ya can't fool mother nature.
Yes, I did. Compare the overall BTU per dollar of radiant floor to resistive electrical heat in my example and radiant comes out ahead. "The source of energy" is the most important thing about this comparison. Not to mention the environmental aspects are tilted way in favor of radiant floor heat. The point is, you cannot insist on apples to apples here because we are comparing different things that perform similar functions.
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