No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty In Innovative ‘Passive Houses’ | Hacker News Reader

No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty In Innovative ‘Passive Houses’

nytimes.com

35 pointskalvin12 comments

I sent this article to my dad, who is an engineering and architecture consultant, and works extensively with the construction industry (New York area). He thinks this can't work in the US, because these houses will end up costing far more here than in Germany.

These houses will only be affordable to manufacture as factory-assembled models. Most people in the US have or want fairly customized houses, which fit their specific requirements. Factory-assembled cookie-cutter homes did not take off here, and it seems unlikely that passive houses' special properties will overcome the distaste.

Assembling custom passive houses on an individual basis, by hand, will require highly qualified construction labor, which costs a lot of money. Most contractors working on people's homes are woefully incompetent and cannot be trusted to put in a level floor, let alone a hermetic seal. This includes union workers. Contractors who know something about building typically charge huge sums for their work, and often make awful mistakes anyway. (Typical story: an elevator which, at the ground level, stops six inches above the level of the floor because the idiot construction foreman decided not to remove an extraneous beam his workers accidentally put into the foundation where it jutted into the elevator shaft.)

So, at the end of the day, a passive house in the US will probably cost two or three times as much to build as a conventional house. Considering that, in my dad's experience, it's hard to convince people to put in the bare minimum of insulation required by building codes ("what, this insulation will cost me an extra 20 thousand dollars?!"), a passive house will probably be a niche curiosity, bought only by wealthy environmentally-conscious consumers.

Have neither you nor your father heard or visited the mcmansion-filled exurbs around any large city? A friend of mine's parents recently brought one of those, and as I was looking through the booklet, I was awe-struck by the uniformity of it. There were 3 or 4 basic models, with 3 or 4 facades available for each one.

They might not be factory-assembled in the literal sense, but they are very much cookie-cutter and highly uniform in both visual and structural design. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Markham-s...

This is an interesting article, mainly because it shows up the differences between the European attitude and the American one.

1. Europeans build smaller, but with higher quality. Americans are not so fussy about quality as long as it's big. Witness the spread of 3000+ sq ft homes across our exurbs.

2. With cheap energy costs predominant, a large house can be built cheaply - thin walls, vinyl siding, asphalt roof, cheap windows - and even still, the costs of heating and cooling can be manageable, even though much more energy is used.

It would be interesting to compare point by point, the area, cost structure, including labor, of a European house and an American house.

I agree with gcv, and with the article, that the cost of building like this in the US is probably prohibitive for most homebuyers in the US.

The interesting question, in parallel with cars, is can the direction of US policy and custom be steered towards smaller and smarter without a failure of house builders and car companies alike?

Should I worry that I immediately started thinking how this would combine with seasteading?

Yes, and you should read a little less Ayn Rand and broaden the thoughts you allow yourself to think =P.

This is the kind of pigeon-holing which prevents one from actually considering an idea on its merits.

For example, what did OP say that suggests they don't allow themselves to think broadly? It's a baseless assumption rooted in your own personal biases, and has nothing to do with the idea at hand.

Which is not to say that I'm particularly enthusiastic about sea-steading. Who's to say though, that its time won't come?

Certainly not Ayn Rand; she thought it would be here yesterday.

I wonder how well this would work in Phoenix?

For us the problem isn't getting enough heat, its keeping the heat out. And our air conditioning bills in the summer are astronomical.

you can get the idea for free from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house

Excellent. A major interest of mine, thanks for the link!

I don't like that article makes it all or nothing. You can use many of the elements and ideas of a passive house, and still include a furnace.

Indeed, the core idea is to use a contra-flow heat exchange so that you can still have some ventilation. They are talking about 90% heat recovery. What the technology buys you is ten times as much air flow for a fixed heat supply.

How do you want to use that? The article pushes the idea of small, stuffy house that uses the technology to push the heat requirement down towards what is given off by the occupants and their gadgets. More generally it lets you live in a better ventilated house in winter, because reduces the heating bills associated with air changes.

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