Building for the peak oil future

With sufficient insulation & smart design, one can cut HVAC costs considerably. See here:

ecojoes.com/no-more-electric-bill/

frugalmarketing.com/dtb/amorylovins.shtml

IIRC, air conditioners generally run off electricity - the bulk of which is generated by non-petroleum sources. Note also that oil only accounted for ~10% of 2002 US residential/commercial energy consumption; the bulk came from natural gas (admittedly finite) and electricity.

Wired magazine recently had an article on misconceptions about energy useage and the author made the point that it is generally takes much less energy to cool a house by 20-30 degrees during a hot summer day than it costs to heat a home by 50-60 degrees (or more) on a cold winter day and night. It seems more profligate to us, perhaps because mankind is used to the idea of heating as a basic necessity - we've done it for so long, with fires that it seems normal, but we've only had air conditioning for a few years and so it seems so luxurious and wasteful. But under this analysis it would make more sense for all of us to move further south to places that don't get the worst of the cold, even if it meant we had to use more air conditioning.

Wired magazine recently had an article on misconceptions about energy useage and the author made the point that it is generally takes much less energy to cool a house by 20-30 degrees during a hot summer day than it costs to heat a home by 50-60 degrees (or more) on a cold winter day and night. It seems more profligate to us, perhaps because mankind is used to the idea of heating as a basic necessity - we've done it for so long, with fires that it seems normal, but we've only had air conditioning for a few years and so it seems so luxurious and wasteful. But under this analysis it would make more sense for all of us to move further south to places that don't get the worst of the cold, even if it meant we had to use more air conditioning.

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.

I'm waiting for contractors to start building houses with passive solar cooling, using solar chimneys to draw cool air through ducts several feet underground.

As for skyscrapers, in a world of $300/barrel oil, the economic rationale for having them will disappear. We're almost certainly in the process of shifting to a decentralized economy of small-scale industrial production for local markets. What's the point of skyscrapers when there's no longer any global financial centers or large corporations? Maybe they'll give the WTC site back to the Syrian neighborhood David Rockefeller and the Port Authority stole it from.

In England there is no need for air-conditioning. Heating is needed, but winters are much milder than in northern USA. I grew up in Victorian houses, with draughts, high ceilings, no insulation, and small, single-glazed windows, and was used to heating being enormously expensive. My present house was built in the 1950s, and heating costs maybe 20% what it would in an older house of the same size - big, double-glazed south-facing windows, low ceilings, cavity-wall insulation, etc. Houses built since the 1970s, though, have such poor workmanship that the heating costs have probably gone up again.

I will say that if we do lose easy access to energy, it won't be AC that I'm worried about. AC was always considered to be optional. Sure, miserable without it, but it is lack of /heating/ ability that'll kill people around here.

Even a series of 90 degree days in a row will just make most people miserable. Dip much below 40 and not only do pipes freeze, but we're talking about dangerous, and here.. it goes way lower than 40.

Most of us keep our houses way too warm in the winter. Yes, you need to have heat, but with enough sweaters, wooley slippers, and comforters on the bed, it's not necessary to have the thermostat much over the low 60s. Doing a lot of baking / roasting in the oven keeps things warm too.

What really helps is having a front porch with windows which can be left open in the summer, then closed in the winter. Our front porch faces south, and can be quite liveable most of the winter, especially if it's sunny. It provides a warming "zone" so that the front door isn't immediately exposed to blasts of cold winter air.

For many people, A/C *is* necessary, especially when you have many days or weeks of 90+ degree weather, including at night. Older people especially are at risk from extreme heat (remember all those older people who died in France some years back.)

From listening to the stories of my grandparents, both native to North Texas, about what life was like without a/c, I have always said that Dallas quite simple owes its existence as a big city to a/c. I have always imagined that it wouldn't be hard at all to compare population and new building starts from before a/c and after a/c and find an overwhelming confirmation of this.

It took a certain kind of person to live here. Those tough enough or foolhardy enough to move here in the first place and their unfortunate children who had no choice until they got old enough to leave!

Now having said that, I also have to speak up for the pre a/c days. According to my grandparents, Dallas was a much different town. People were forced to live outside during the summers. Life was conducted from the front porch or yard. Since the advent of a/c allowed people to escape the heat, they also lost touch with their neighbors as well. I am not sure the advent of ac did Dallas, and other towns located in the hot and humid as blazes climes, such a favor as it is commonly thought. Cities and towns in more moderate climates have much more of an outdoor existence. They don't need ac as much and therefore the temptation is absent to hermetically seal ones family existence away from the kind of hellish temperatures we regularly experience here in Big D and other places like it.

This is not to say of course that this a/c induced isolation can't be countered somehow. But there is a long way to go to that end.

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.)

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."

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.