> What is considered a house has changed significantly
Houses have been relatively unchanged compared to other things like cars and computers. In fact, most people want little more than just a roof.
Houses have been relatively unchanged compared to other things like cars and computers. In fact, most people want little more than just a roof.
Face it, house construction really hasn't changed much in a century, and definitely not since the 1950s. We're (in the US) still using 2x4 lumber assembled on-site, making walls with gypsum board, etc. Even "manufactured houses" use most of the same techniques and materials.
Thanks to mandatory building codes, innovation in building technique is basically outlawed. For instance, a 4"-thick monolithic concrete dome with basalt fiber reinforcement would likely survive a direct meteorite strike, but would not be code-compliant. The minimum thickness of a concrete wall assumes both a flat wall and steel rebar that may corrode, swell, and cause spalling in a wall less than 8" thick. Basalt fiber composite rebar does not count as reinforcement in some places.
Never mind about inflatable forms, building-sized 3-d printers, self-consolidating concrete, self-repairing concrete, translucent concrete, cast fused stone, centralized fiber-optic building lighting, 48V DC power outlets, advanced composite plumbing, composting toilets, or any other idea you might have that would be 1000x better than the bog-standard stick-built box, on a concrete slab, full of gypsum wallboard, copper wires, and PVC pipes that represents 99.99% of new site-built homes.
Sure, the codes stop you from buying a house that might kill you if the wind changes direction, but they specify only proven construction tech, without providing any economically viable way for new tech to become proven.
Basalt fiber was also classified as a Soviet military secret for a while, so I'm thinking that applications useful for civilians, like concrete rebar, have probably been around since the 1990s.
- We do have more advanced plumbing now. A lot of new houses are being built with PEX tubing, where the tubing is flexible and snaps together, instead of needing to be soldered or glued.
- What would be better than gypsum wallboard? It's dirt-cheap, not that expensive for labor, and people like the way it looks when painted. It also has reasonable insulation value. You could have concrete walls I guess, but I think that would be a lot more expensive, plus it's pretty hard to modify wiring if it's cast in concrete. Personally I think it'd be cool to have walls that are easy to take apart so you can modify the wiring behind them without having to do drywall work and painting, but there's no easy way to do that while having the smooth, painted wall look we enjoy now. The wooden paneling thing would work here, but went out of style decades ago along with shag carpets.
48VDC power outlets? What is the value here? Higher voltage is better for lower losses; it'd be better if we moved to 220VAC like the Europeans have, simply because of lower losses. And adapting appliances would be easy. 48VDC would require completely changing everything, for no real benefit except maybe lower shock hazard. GFCI outlets have mostly solved that problem.
I'm pretty sure a lot of people actually do have composting toilets these days; I don't think they're prevented by code. I've heard of people having them in basement bathrooms, so they don't need to add in expensive pump systems (as they would need to pump the toilet drain pipe's output up to the sewer level). The reason they're not more popular is because they smell (even if just a little) and require maintenance. Not many people really want to deal with that, they just want to flush their toilet and never see their poop again.
What would the benefit of centralized fiber-optic building lighting be? It sounds like a lot of labor cost, to deal with the fiber (which can't be bent in tight corners). Modern LED lighting has rendered this idea completely obsolete IMO. It's simple and cheap and completely compatible with existing Edison sockets. Heck, they're even making fluorescent replacement fixtures now (LED tubes which replace fluorescent tubes), so you're not limited to Edison socket stuff either. LEDs have completely revolutionized lighting; just look at cars now. You don't need to generate light centrally when you can cheaply generate it anywhere you want with LEDs. This sounds like a pie-in-the-sky idea from the 80s.
The main problem I see with building codes is the structure: wood isn't the greatest structural material for many reasons. However, there is more and more steel-frame housing being built, thanks to the lessons learned from commercial building where steel is king. Steel has huge advantages over wood: you can have much longer unsupported spans, and assembly time is shorter because the steel girders just bolt together on-site. As lumber has gotten more expensive, steel has become cost-competitive. Also, steel frames generally make for significantly thicker walls, which gives you better insulation.
PEX has been around long enough to be allowed by code. Something I will now make up on the spot, which may or may not be better or worse than any existing plumbing technology, is not: BAM ceramic, wrapped in nylon fiber and epoxy. I don't know anything about how this material would perform as plumbing, and neither does anyone else. I only suspect that it would be practically immune to clogs. How would I know how it might actually perform in real-world conditions? No one would be allowed to live in the house I plumbed it with.
Gypsum wallboard might be topped by plastic or paper panels filled with phase-change materials, to help regulate the temperature of interior rooms. Some phase change materials are only about 4-7 times as expensive as crude gypsum. Sodium chloride sodium sulfate decahydrate sandwiched between HDPE sheets seems likely.
You can now buy 120V AC 60Hz outlets that have built in USB-A 5V DC charging ports. Some off-grid solar-powered homes have refrigerators that use 48V DC. I know my own home is filled with AC-DC or AC-AC transformers, most of them are not very efficient, and few follow any kind of standard for their connectors. 48V is the typical voltage used for Power-over-Ethernet. The advantage is that you can use one expensive and efficient power supply to power all the electronics devices in your house instead of 50 cheap and wasteful wall warts.
We couldn't upgrade US domestic voltage because we'd have to replace practically every 120V circuit breaker out there that is only rated for 120V on any given path to ground.
Some municipalities require a sewer connection for any building to be fit for occupancy. Some specifically regulate the disposal of human waste. Those regulations usually predate modern composting toilets. I have read news articles where eco-hippies are threatened with eviction from their own home when they ask to have their muni water and sewer shut off because they're going off grid for the benefit of mother Earth, or something. Not my thing, but some people are into it.
Fiber optic lighting can use high efficiency sulfur plasma lamps or direct solar to light interior space. The Smithsonian Museum uses it in some buildings, for a variety of reasons that don't include low cost. Direct solar fiber lighting avoids solar power conversion efficiency and heat or color rendering issues at the endpoint. Embedding optical fibers in concrete can produce translucent concrete, which has potential lighting applications, such as light-emitting countertops. The idea might actually be from the 80s; I'm not aware why it never really caught on except as a footnote on "whatever happened to the technology of the future?" type of shows that sometimes appear on the lesser-viewed niche television channels.
Steel also has a notable advantage over the wood studs available in 2016. You can get steel studs of consistent quality, and all of them are rolled straight and cut square. But it took an overly long time for them to make it into the building codes, and the codes for steel-stud construction are an order of magnitude more complex than for wood 2x4s, simple due to the greater number of options available to the builder. Steel studs have gauge thicknesses, shape, nominal dimensions, alloy compositions, anti-corrosion coatings, etc., whereas wooden 2x4s or 2x6s basically have a (mostly) integer lumber grade and decades of institutional builder knowledge behind them.
Can you imagine what the building industry would look like if builders adopted new structural members as readily as software pros switched languages and frameworks? Every house would be dirt cheap and look unimaginably awesome... and would unexpectedly kill 0.05% of occupants for no readily discernible reason. Builders don't need to go that far. They could adopt new tech more readily without worrying about killing anyone.
Steel needs to be heavily regulated, mainly because there can be a zyllion things wrong with it. Wrong shapes/gauges/dimensions can cause stress concentrations, fractures, increased wear,tendency to warp, etc. Improper compositions can mean brittleness, bad welds, corrosion (galvanic one too! - same thing for coatings), expansion problems, on and on Wood is age old tech, you either get good quality lumber or you don't. You put oak and spruce next to each other and it looks cool. Try putting bronze and steel together and see how that works.
It is a good thing to require sewer connections, there are people who will happily dump, well, shit, right under your fence if it means paying few dollars less each month
And yes, I can image the last part. It would be a nice premise for a horror movie...
Usually the tech just kind of comes along and happens, when it's time comes, throwing random stuff at a wall worked out so great before (cough asbestos cough)
And as you say, asbestos was a disaster. But building codes did not prevent diseases from an unforeseen inhalation hazard.
Do you have any links about your phase-change panels? How would that help? And why wouldn't you just use a whole-house HVAC system?
The thing about wall warts really isn't true any more, and switching to 48VDC wouldn't help anyway. Most everyone's finally gotten away from the old iron-core wall-warts, and moved to extremely efficient SMPS-based ones. But even if they hadn't, switching to 48VDC wouldn't help because you still have to convert that down to a voltage that electronics can use (usually 5V or less). You can't transmit 5V over household wiring; the losses would be enormous, so you'd have to have huge copper bus-bars. And converting 48VDC to 5VDC isn't any easier than converting 120VAC to 5VDC, using modern SMPSes. (If this were the 80s, it'd be even worse because they didn't have inexpensive DC-to-DC converters back then.) I'm sorry, there just isn't any way to efficiently supply all your electronics from a single power supply. Modern electronics don't even use single voltages, much of the time: a typical computer uses 3.3V, 5V and 12V at a minimum (they used to also use -5V) from the main power supply, and then they regulate that down to 1.8V or less for the CPU with a power supply right on the motherboard.
Upgrading domestic US voltage would require big changes at wiring panels, because houses are set up with 240VAC split systems, where the house is fed with two 240V (line-to-line) hot lines from a 3-phase system, and then split with a grounded neutral line so that each side is 120V line-to-neutral. You could conceivably upgrade a US house to 240V Euro-spec, assuming the wiring's insulation is capable of 240V, but you'd have to change all the outlets and you'd have to completely replace the main panel. Replacing the breakers wouldn't work because the panel itself enforces this split system. Modifying the panel (changing the neutrals to hot) would probably be dangerous as the panel wasn't designed for that.
The sewer connection requirement is indeed crap. (pun intended) If someone doesn't want municipal water or sewer, they shouldn't have to pay for it. But on the other hand, is it even possible? A typical sink or shower still uses a lot of water; where are you going to drain that in a city? The city wants your waste water back so they can process it and reuse it. And dumping it outside could create a lot of problems, depending on the environment there.
I doubt that sulfur plasma is more efficient than LED. Cities are now replacing monochrome high-pressure sodium street lamps (used because of their efficiency) with LEDs. For direct solar lighting, that is indeed intriguing. However, you can go to Home Depot now and buy a lighting tube for around $150 that does the same thing for any upper-floor rooms: it has a collector on the roof, a reflective tube going through the attic, and then a lens on the ceiling of the room below to "funnel" light into the room. I have a relative with one in their house in the bathroom and it works quite well when it's light outside. There's no problem with code compliance. You do still need an electric light though, since the sun isn't always shining.
As for steel complexity, that shouldn't be a problem. There are builders who specialize in steel-frame houses, so presumably they have all this worked out and have picked their preferred options. "Andar Steel" is one I saw a while ago. According to them, assembly is much faster because the beams are all pre-cut and drilled at the factory, and then the "kit" is assembled on-site according to the plans, sorta like an IKEA kit. It's not like you have some yahoo "builder" who grabs some generic steel beams and tries to build a house out of them.