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Comment by etimberg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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.

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)

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