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Comment by mattjaynes | Hacker News Reader

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH of Ruby on Rails fame) gave a great talk recently on air quality: https://youtu.be/MRqh8oLY7Ik

Apparently his wife was showing signs of Formaldehyde poisoning after they moved into a newly constructed home. This motivated him to investigate the air quality in their house and he bought industrial-level air testing equipment to figure out what was going on (since many of the consumer-grade devices were wildly inaccurate). He also did a deep dive into the research on how air quality impacts cognitive and creative performance. Fascinating talk, worth watching.

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Just reached 4:30 sec and he has mentioned lack of ventilation in their house, which I know to be a common problem with new build housing through dealing with condensation problems.

UK: most of the bog standard double glazed windows have a little vent up at the top so you can open a fairly small slat and get a small air gap.

35min: his risk priorities are mould, particulate matter, volatile organic chemicals, co2, on the grounds that CO2 is easier to manage

The problem is that if it’s cold enough outside that you need double glazing, then opening the slats would negate the benefit. Heat exchangers really are the only solution here, but of course the UK seems to be at least a century behind on residential building standards compared to anywhere else I’ve lived in Europe.

The idea is to minimize heat loss from conductivity through the windows, but accept the heat loss that comes with venting air.

Old single-pane windows were missing the vent probably because a) old building codes let you have less ventilation or b) the old windows were leaking air around the frames in addition to conductively leaking heat through the single-pane glass.

Acoustic isolation is a motivator for double glazing in some locations. And the vents are small (6mm by 30cm full open).

Most Victorian era houses have 'air bricks' in various locations (terracotta bricks with a small grid of holes in them) and the houses were pretty leaky.

UK government is moving to remove * cooking on open gas from the building regulations for new homes in a few years (big methane/burning fume generator). Eventually as post above parent says we will move to more rational ways of heating the houses. Piping an inflammable gas to millions of houses has always struck me as a bit strange.

I really hope they don’t. One, electric cooking is shit however you wrap it up. I have found a large correlation between people being okay with electric cooking in places I’ve lived and also not cooking/not knowing how to cook. That’s probably the only way electric cooking has become so prevalent in the UK. Who would want to anyway if stuck with electric?

Two, I do not want to have to wait hours for the tank to heat up again after someone takes half a minute too long in the shower.

The power just isn’t there when it comes to electric water heating. I am very glad to live in a house with a combi gas boiler right now where the whole house can have a shower on demand, straight after each other if need be.

Until we all have massive heat pumps or some other way of getting high-power heat from domestic electric, it makes complete sense to me for us to pipe gas around while most of our domestic energy usage in the UK goes to heat.

Induction cooking is electrical cooking. Do you mean conductive electrical cooking?

Yes, induction does have higher max power in comparison to the terrible resistance hobs and the slightly less terrible ceramics. The problem with induction is that it doesn't work when you don't have a completely even bottom (on your cookware). Cookware warps over time. You can get induction wok stoves, but that misses the point. You can also get a nice gas stove with a massive centre hob for your wok needs.

Even forgetting the evenness issues, which ceramic stoves share too, the modulation just isn't there. Lower power on induction and ceramic means alternating the same power on and off. This does average out over the long term to a lower power, but what if you need a constant lower power? The power settings also tend to be discrete and far apart, which is again completely useless for a lot of fine applications. It's completely useless for instance you want your pilau rice to steam properly at the end of cooking at a low power in a shallow, broad stainless steel pan (as it should be), rather than sticking to the bottom of the pan.

Warped cookware works fine with induction hobs.

I completely agree on the acoustic isolation part though. The slats completely negate that in noisy areas even when closed.

No, that is not the idea.

Unless you mean the idea is "how do we make it look like we're doing something about building performance without hurting volume house builders' feelings?".

The 'proper' solution all homes should be built with is low air permeability (no trickle vents) and a whole house ventilation system, ideally with a heat exchanger.

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