Comment by dubcanada | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dubcanada | Hacker News Reader

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> Light weight timber frame construction on pile foundations

> But with modern materials (or good old traditional maintenance) thats just not true, a timber frame house can last hundreds of years.

I am not sure were you are reading that "timber frame house can last hundreds of years" but I don't believe that is correct, most timber frame houses have an estimated 30 year life span. A stone/brick house can last thousands of years.

I do agree that a stick frame/light weight timber house is way less concrete then a brick/stone house. But UK doesn't have a ton of trees, so the majority of those trees are imported from EU places like Belarus or Canada. Which is a bunch of gas in itself.

Pile foundations also have tons of problems, and have a very high fail rate. They don't do well with salt water, so costal areas in UK will have problems, they don't do well with stone/bedrock. Which UK has a ton of.

I believe there is tons of work to do, but I disagree that the solution is stick framing and pile foundations. I think the actual solution is innovation and reduction of some building standards to allow innovation. It's very very difficult to even experiment with building materials as every building code requires X insulation and any building official will complain if you have Y. So everyone just uses X.

ICF for example is absolute garbage, its marketed as a eco friendly, green building material that's made from oil and filled with a truck load of cement. How that got classified as a "eco-friendly green building material" is beyond me.

Meanwhile things that are actually eco-friendly like hemp, straw, etc all require a ton of engineering and have zero standards, so everything has to be engineered. And you'll get crazy looks from building officials when you ask for a review of your straw timber frame house.

I live in a ballon-framed house built in 1926. Coming up on 100 years and with reasonable maintenance there is no reason it won't last another 100. There are some terribly built wooden houses that will just rot away, but it's not that hard to do it right.

Wood as a building material when used properly can be incredibly resilient, especially with modern mass timber solutions rather than raw wood.

Agree. My first house was a wood-frame bungalow built near the prior turn of the century. As long as you don't get termites, and maintain the roof and siding so you don't have water leaking in, wood houses will last basically forever, or at least on the order of 100 years.

I'd like to point out that wood 100 years ago was mostly old growth, which differs drastically to the lumber available today.

Modern mass timber more than corrects that problem. It does a fantastic job using fast growing, new growth lumber to produce highly precise parts that are factory produced exactly to spec to nearly eliminate waste.

Highly precise lumber parts sounds like an oxymoron. The standard assumption for wood is that it's only straight while it's being cut. If they've invented fix for that, it's not gonna be the wood that they're using that does it, but some extra processing to make like a particle board or something

Modern mass timber has advanced a long way beyond cheap particle board. Read up on cross laminated timber. Manufactured and cut exactly to size and often requires no cutting on site.

>with modern mass timber solutions rather than raw wood

Do you mean things like LSL?

I actually wonder what the longevity of LSL is compared to raw wood. Since it's a ton of resin mixed with wood, I wonder about the resin part of it.

It does seem much better to build with as bugs won't eat it and it's perfectly straight.

Laminated strand is certainly under the heading of mass timber, but I’m referring more to cross laminated timber (CLT). It still uses resin, but with much more wood it doesn’t suffer from the sort of rot and de-laminating problems OSB has, but it’s still highly engineered and highly precise like LSL.

Laminated veneer lumber (LVL) has become common in North America for beams and joists. CLT uses even larger components and is even more flexible. It’s just starting to be used but you can build everything from a house to 20 storey buildings.

I know nothing about this, but do you know what the environmental/recyclable potential of the resins are?

> I am not sure were you are reading that "timber frame house can last hundreds of years" but I don't believe that is correct, most timber frame houses have an estimated 30 year life span. A stone/brick house can last thousands of years.

I grew up in a four family timber house built in the 1960's. It's still standing. As are all the houses on that road which were all built at the same time. We moved to a timber house built around 1910. It's still standing - I walked past it just last year. My grandparents lived in a development of all wooden houses built in the 1950's. They're all standing.

Where did you get this notion they have a life span of 30 years? Norway has plenty of wooden houses that have stood for a 100+ years, and a huge bulk of post-war construction from the 50's and 60's in wood.

On the more extreme end, there are a number of stave churches in wood dating back to the 1200's. Of course they're the outlies that survived, and have certainly required maintenance.

EDIT: Here's a list of stave churches in Norway, and construction years. Some of these have been rebuilt during that time, but even those that have typically have a lifetime of each iteration measured in centuries, with a few exceptions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stave_churches_in_Norw...

As a fun curiosity, here's Vang stave church, "moved" from Norway to Poland in 1842, originally built in the 1200's. "Moved" because most of the material ended up being discarded because the builders handling the re-erection didn't quite know how and found it easier to replace most of it. So the current iteration is really "only ~180 years old, and might have been moved and rebuilt once before, but in any case each iteration survived rather a bit longer than 30 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vang_Stave_Church

30 years is far too low. Most homes built in the US will easily make it 70 years.

Heck, I’ve seen many trailer houses that are in decent shape and >30 years old.

The life span is probably more due to the lifespan of the plumbing. On high-grade copper(L- or K-) you can get a useful life of 50 years but PEX is only rated for 30 years, and the lowest grade of copper(M-type) has a similar replacement interval. The valves used in plumbing fixtures also wear out and need replacement periodically. And the valve housings do as well. The anode in a water heater will probably only last a couple of decades. These are all replaceable parts.

Siding is in a similar state, with many modern sidings have replacement intervals in the decades, and shorter time periods if you don't paint every 5-10 years.

If properly maintained and if parts are replaced in a timely manner a house can last indefintely. My partner and I own a house from 1935 that was last renovated in the 1990s, and I'm starting to have to make minor plumbing repairs. I think in the next 10 years or so we'll have to re-pipe and re-wire. But the framing and sheathing is almost all original, except for the roof deck which was replaced first in the 1990's and then parts were replaced when we re-roofed last year(the original roofer did not know how to frame to support a rake board).

Everything also changes if you factor in repainting and replacement of interior fixtures.

But still, if you maintain it and factor in all these repairs and replacements your house can last for hundreds of years.

For what it's worth, I have a 200 year old cottage that probably has a few centuries left in it, and the plumbing and wiring is all in conduits that are easily accessed. Maybe we should make it easier to replace this stuff without ripping the house apart?

Different climate but I lived in two poorly maintained Queenslanders[1] which were a popular style of timber on piles here, both 50 years old and would easily last longer. One even had minor termite damage which was later treated.

Many people here do knock down rebuilds but most would easily last longer than 30 years. Many timber houses get re-stumped after a few decades and concrete piles seem to be a popular choice for replacement.

I see a lot of poorly built homes on slabs as well which seem to have a similar lifespan as the Queenslanders (anecdotally).

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queenslander_(architecture)

Timber frames can definitely last hundreds of years. I have multiple family members on my wife's side who live in houses with parts dating back 100-200 years. They've been kept up and more or less continuously occupied, but it's not as though that meant continuously conditioned as we would think of it until sometime in the 20th century.

Hell, you can drive through New England and see barns that are 150 years old that are only starting to fall down after 50 years of deferred maintenance.

If you keep wood dry, it'll last a good long while. Whether you consider 100-200 years a long time, will of course depend on perspective:

"In Europe, they think 100 miles is a long way. In the US, they think 100 years is a long time."

- William the Conqueror

> I am not sure were you are reading that "timber frame house can last hundreds of years" but I don't believe that is correct, most timber frame houses have an estimated 30 year life span. A stone/brick house can last thousands of years.

I have in fact lived in a timber frame house that was 400 years old and going strong. No idea about its history, but it was rather comfortable and cozy. It wasn't particularly well insulated though.

> estimated 30 year life span

Did you misplace a digit? If you're only getting 30 years from a wood frame house, you're definitely doing something wrong.

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