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Comment by luggageproblem | Hacker News Reader

>>> Across the road from my cabin was a huge clear-cut--hundreds of acres of massive spruce stumps interspersed with tiny Douglas firs--products of what they call "Reforestation," which I guess makes the spindly firs en masse a "Reforest," which makes an individual spindly fir a "Refir," which means you could say that Weyerhauser, who owns the joint, has Refir Madness, since they think that sawing down 200-foot-tall spruces and replacing them with puling 2-foot Refirs is no different from farming beans or corn or alfalfa. They even call the towering spires they wipe from the Earth's face forever a "crop"--as if they'd planted the virgin forest! But I'm just a fisherman and may be missing some deeper significance in their nomenclature and stranger treatment of primordial trees.

from The River Why

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Can’t even have toilet paper without the logging industry. Housing would be pretty savage if we had to build everything out of rocks and mud. I strongly believe that any currently old growth forests should be protected but everything else really is just a crop.

If you consider concrete and cement to be rocks and mud, no, outside of NA, most of the world uses stones and mud just fine.

~~atleast an angry drunk can't punch through my wall~~

Having lived in both constructions, for the American environs, wood-built houses are vastly superior to cement ones.

Wood construction is better insulating, easier to repair, easier overhaul as the times inevitably change, naturally regulates temperature, adapts better to different weathers, flexes more and thus adapts to stress better, requires fewer and less stringent inspections, fails less catastrophically, has a smaller carbon footprint, is cheaper and easier to source, and is easier to transport.

Wood constructed houses have one of the arguably worst thermal profiles because of their extremely low thermal mass. Basically, they heat up quickly and cool down quickly. In most of Europe and North America you want the opposite: a structure that evens out high temperature throughout the day, and radiates warmth at night. Brick, stone, or clay do that very successfully. Think of an old stone church at a warm summer day: it's comfortably cool inside, completely without AC

That is good for temperate climates in the right season when there is a big difference between day and night. It's a terrible design for consistently hot or cold places. i.e. Norway in the winter you're running some kind of heating (coupled with insulation) around the clock. A large thermal mass would just be constantly sapping that energy away. In Spanish summers a large thermal mass just means you don't get to take advantage of the slight cooling you get at night.

If your daily high or low temperature is still twenty Kelvin below or above a comfortable temperature, insulation is far more important than thermal mass.

>Wood constructed houses have one of the arguably worst thermal profiles

I can't find any research backing this claim. The exact opposite appears to be true. Stone remains cold all winter and hot all summer. And it's expensive to heat and cool.

In addition, wood can be renewable and has a much smaller carbon footprint than mining and quarrying.

I'm still stuck on dirt-crete (concrete made from dirt and/or saw dust) walls after seeing the vibrant aircrete community on YouTube. It looks like an excellent solution for walls. Thermal mass, air entrained, cheap materials, easy to shape.

I've been watching a lot of real estate videos on YouTube, and it boggles my mind that people pay seven, even eight digit figures for houses made of wood. It's obviously rational (or so many people wouldn't do it), but it is really, really hard to drop the prejudice coming from my part of the world that Wooden = Flimsy & Cheap.

> Wood construction [...] requires fewer and less stringent inspections

I would expect the opposite. I don't have to worry about the concrete of my home rotting because of a water infiltration, or being eaten by termites.

Rotting is a lot easier to spot than structural failures and cracks slowly building inside concrete walls. Wood beams can be repaired more easily and individually than concrete if they do rot. Finally, modern woods are less prone to rotting due to treatment.

That's interesting, can you elaborate? I was under the impression that the main benefit of wood+sheetrock was cost and speed of construction.

Updated my comment with details

Tl;dr, basically it’s just real cheap.

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