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Joseph Lstiburek talked about this(1) in talks going back to the early 2010s. He bitched about bike racks being worth a LEED point whereas good insulation wasn't really...

(1)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkfAcWpOYAA

Good insulation and isolation can also help substantially with privacy and tranquility. Good airflow can help human health and reducing externalizes that aren't well measured by a single building's certification.

I live in an apartment in Toronto that is LEED certified. To be honest, it's not that great but for different reasons than you outlines. The insulation is too good and so the building is too warm all year round. My unit can easily be > 24C without any heating running even in winter.

Yep, but probably it has nothing to do with LEEDs, but just Canadian own construction experience that is not even code mandated.

LEEDs for example allows for buildings with completely catastrophical thermal design to get certified: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Aqua_Tow... (Chicago)

Are you sure it's because of the insulation? Many condos are sweltering in the middle spring (even with heat off) because residents living on floors below yours crank the heat and it all rises.

When I lived in a condo (Bloor/Yonge), the situation was so bad (12th floor) that if it hit 12°C outside, I needed to turn on the A/C, which is awful from an environmental POV.

This and most modern buildings are heated and cooled via a central heating/cooling system which distributes the hot/cold via water.

So, it may be even though you don't have the heat 'on' there is still hot water running through your apartment's heating system.

Yep, and this is why central control, along with temperature sensors make a giant lot of sense to prevent such situation.

A simple thermostat is not enough, and even a PID one will not do the job if external thermal influx is not in the model.

I once worked on a HVAC controller for hotels in Singapore, and other commercial venues which helped the hotel operator to save on HVAC by packing visitors more closely depending on occupancy.

This avoid paradoxical situations of it being chilling cold in some suites with zero aircon use when it is +30 outside because of an unlucky combination of HVAC settings in neighbouring suites.

Doesn't all this imply there should be more focus on inter-floor and inter-room insulation, to effectively isolate floors/apartments/suites thermally from each other?

Quite possible parent was heating the loop water with their a/c which the North-facing residents extracted running their system in heat mode.

Which makes it all an incredibly inefficient system to move heat from the sun-facing side to the north side because you’re not allowed to prop open the damn doors.

Is it possible that all of your neighbors in your building have their heater on? This is what happened to me in a building in NYC. It would actually get so warm in the winter I would have to crack the window open or I would get a nose bleed.

As someone who also lives in Toronto: most things being built now are giant class towers.

Now, glass sucks at insulation (even triple glaze), but—depending on the coatings—it lets in a lot of sun light and with that potentially heat.

While in a perfect world there would be no / minimal exchange between the inside of the structure and the outside,† being too warm may be better than being too cold, as I'm guessing that it's easier to throw away the 'free' heat of the sun away than introducing it in winter. Certainly heat pumps can go either way, but I figure that it's easier to dump it.

† The entire point of "buildings" are to be environmental separators after all.

>giant class towers.

That is an excellent typo.

There is a courthouse in Phoenix, Arizona, USA built predominately with glass. Summer days there are in the 40s. It boggles my mind.

>or I would get a nose bleed.

Are nose bleeds associated with high temperatures?

Yes. I'm not completely sure the mechanism, but I attended elementary school in a warm climate, at a school in which the hallways were exterior and only classrooms air conditioned. I reliably got nosebleeds on the three or four hottest days of th year in line for class.

I think dry air is a larger driver, but that often comes with excessive interior temperatures.

Heating plus air leaks results in dry air.

As you heat some air the relative humidity drops. If your room is not leaky, the relatively humidity will rise as it cools back off, but if you're constantly leaking air your indoor humidity will approach that of the outside air raised to the indoor temp.

This is why energy recovery ventilators exist-- to exchange outside air without losing or gaining as much relative humidity change.

That's by design!

See: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-05/the-curio...

Insulation doesn't simply make a building warmer inside, it keeps heat out just as well as it keeps heat in. If your apartment is too warm in the winter it is probably because you have too much sunlight coming through your windows, or because your downstairs neighbor lives in a sauna.

Keeping heat out is of somewhat limited use unless you have air conditioning, because there are a whole bunch of sources of heat (people, appliances, solar gain through the windows, etc) that are enough to make the inside of a well-insulated and well-sealed building warmer than the outside. Also, a lot of non-US countries strongly discourage aircon on residential buildings for environmental reasons; I know the UK certainly does and Canada is probably similar.

I don't know much about LEEDs and maybe that should be updated, but I live in a cold climate and I see a lot of focus on insulation and insulation efficiency, both in new construction and updating old buildings.

This idea that there's not a focus on insulation in the west seems kinda strange to me.

Same in France, I'm buying a condo and looking into all this for the renovation, and everybody is screaming "insulation by the outside".

If you want to make sure things are built properly, look into the topic of "building science":

* https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-001-t...

Matt Risinger, a general contractor in Austin, Texas, has a lot of good videos on the topics:

* https://www.youtube.com/c/MattRisinger/videos

Even if you can't use the same techniques that he does (and pay for some of the premium products), it may be possible to still use some of the general theory / principles.

Risinger makes great videos. Doing a 150sqm extension now and plan to apply perfect wall concepts.

Matt's videos are worth watching, but it's important to note most his videos are motivated by his sponsorships and it's often hard to parse out when he's shilling and when he's not.

Betters resources with real science can be found at

* https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/

* https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/

Just because he's sponsored does not necessarily mean he's wrong: he's been beating this drum for many years before the sponsorships came. Sort by date and check out the potato quality videos from long ago, and you'll see the same principles being talked about.

Though certainly, if you're going to do a build yourself, research any specific products to see if they meet your needs, functionally and monetarily.

* He tends to build on the higher end of things, and has clients that are willing to pay. Of course he's currently building his own new home, and doing things the way he's talked about.

* He's in a warm-humid climate (US Climate Zone 2). Plenty of things I wouldn't do exactly the same since I'm in Canada.

But Joe Lstiburek was born and raised in Canada, and lives in the north-east, and he's saying many of the same things when it comes to building science:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lstiburek

Yah, I'm not arguing that Matt is saying incorrect things, I'm saying his videos need extra scrutiny because he is sometimes using his videos for advertising and gives less than accurate portrayals of certain products. It looks like one his more egregious videos has been removed wherein he's reviewing types of siding and has some pretty laughable "tests" that he recreates inconsistently in order to prove fiber cement siding is superior to all other siding.

Additionally, to my knowledge, Matt isn't originating any of these ideas, he's just implementing them.

I don't mean to be so hard on Matt, I excitedly watch almost every new video of his and I'm excited there are people out there making building science more accessible. I just wish he'd so a slightly better job differentiating between shilling and presenting information.

> Additionally, to my knowledge, Matt isn't originating any of these ideas, he's just implementing them.

He's fairly open about this. He was recently on the Essential Craftsman Podcast and he talks about trying to educate and pass on knowledge:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYG63Cb83sc

You’re barking at the wrong tree, I’m buying a condo and the outside walls and the roof are common goods. I don’t have a technical issue but a human one: what in the neighbor’s mind? And how is their wallet feeling about huge work right now?

Then we can talk r-values, zoning rules, permitting and planning.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a technophile, I watch American construction shows, and I bought a bunch of books on renovation at the same time as the condo, but it’s only a small part of what has to be done.

Can concur here in Western Europe. For more than a decade we've had a regulation where you have to run your plans for a new building through a tool that calculates a score reflecting the projected energy consumption in a broad sense. The maximum allowed score has been adjusted down every few years.

The effect is indeed that all new buildings (and renovations that involve some kind of constructing new volumes) have improved massively in energy consumption. Still, we have such a massive amount of old buildings with next to none insulation that get renovated so slowly that it will take a long time to actually make a decent dent in reducing our climate footprint.

But there's definitely a good focus on improving our buildings. Main issue with these new buildings is no longer having decent insulation to keep heating costs down but making sure they don't overheat when there's good weather, and ventilating them properly. This is also part of the score calculation but in my experience not sufficiently highlighted.

The problem is engineers look at this like engineers and make assumptions and decisions based on the objectives given and their toolkit. When you hire an ASHRAE certified engineer, he’s going to be all about HVAC, based on whatever the architect produced.

Usually that means a focus on less energy usage. That frequently doesn’t align with lower cost or optimal solution. For example, buying a 95% efficient boiler for my home would cost significantly more over its useful life when you account for capital costs, retrofit for exhaust, and operational/maintenance expense (efficient units require annual inspection and maintenance via service contract). 80% results in more fuel consumption, but significant lower TCO.

In commercial or larger buildings, the obsession with sealing windows introduces lots of waste. The cost of more heating efficiency is more A/C days.

Also, the practices around construction have changed, driven partially by “efficiency” to build boxes with no passive ventilation. If you go into a well-designed circa 1910 building like a school, office and other inhabited spaces had higher ceilings, higher windows, etc that permitted passive ventilation. My house in upstate NY is like this... we use air conditioning for <20 days a year, and our extra heating costs are negligible. My neighbor’s circa 1995 house is a modern series of interconnected boxes — they have to run AC from June-September because there is no effective ventilation.

I know you only said "partially by efficiency", but the other part is pretty important. another goal of sealing the building is to align the moisture and thermal barriers with each other. this is important, because this is how you control humidity inside the envelope. in theory, this makes it much less likely that you get mold, rot, etc. if you're going to heat/cool your house at all, you really don't want heated inside air getting cooled down in the winter or warm outside air getting cooled in the summer. if you have significant passive ventilation, you don't really have a moisture or thermal barrier.

Agreed — I was trying to capture a lot in a small space without being hand-wavy. (Not sure if I succeeded)

My big “beef” is that assumptions that require active, intelligent building management and maintenance have their own risks. These are hard to quantify and thus discounted.

Case in point: I worked for a decade in a building with professional management and all sorts of efficiency programs where chronic issues like a leaking roof were ignored for 30 years. In theory, the HVAC did a great job of moisture control. In reality, there was 3 feet of water on the roof. (Water wins) Point being, budgets drive suboptimal behavior.

In my personal case, my house was designed with features that permit user-controlled airflow and thermal flow. It has modern windows, enhanced attic ventilation, etc that improve performance. Many buildings are not and are dependent on active ventilation to be livable or mold-free.

Problem is once someone built a cheap building 30 years ago, it's not worth $200K to tear it down and rebuild for thermal efficiency.

And new build buyers want homes that look "normal" or "classic", not experimental (even if experimental is based on proved designs elsewhere.)

From my experience on short stints in Dubai, and Qatar, single house residentials can well be both. Lots of villas there built with foam concrete exterior walls, in which you are living like in a thermos, and which still look rather conventional.

Their highrises are probably a bit more avant-garde than American ones, but nevertheless they sell like cookies.

> Canada, and Toronto area had tons of LEEDs certed luxury condos being heated like no tomorrow in Winter. Things are even worse in Vancouver, but that's offset by milder weather.

That's called Green Washing. Now, Snow Washing is the process in which dirty money is brought into Canada to purchase said assets.