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Comment by Renaud | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget one thing though: Canadian homes are built to resist the cold and they are usually well-insulated.

Hong Kong, by comparison, is probably one of the worse places when it comes to thermal insulation. When it's 12 outside, it's not far from being the same inside.

It always amazed me how such an energy-hungry place, where electricity is expensive, is built so cheaply that insulation doesn't factor at all. Energy-efficiency is totally unknown when it comes to housing.

I'm yet to see a double-glazed window pane in Hong Kong.

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>It always amazed me how such an energy-hungry place, where electricity is expensive, is built so cheaply that insulation doesn't factor at all. Energy-efficiency is totally unknown when it comes to housing.

I agree that it's absurd. Switch off the aircon in summer in any of the apartments I've lived in there, and it's back at 33C within 10 minutes. After several years I finally rebuilt a place from the concrete up with proper insulation and double-glazed windows and the difference is astonishing.

The amount of wasted energy is depressing. Not so surprising though when the same groups that own the larger housing developers also own the power company.

No, Canadian homes are not built to resist the cold. They have the same silly 3cm cardboard walls that American houses have. This was very stunning for me coming from a country where the temperature rarely drops below 0 degrees Celsius. I have learnt that the Canadians only feel like they are being eco-friendly because the only place they are comparing themselves with is the US. I mean: a remote control for your car's motor so you can have it pre-heat, half of the people driving around in pick up trucks or the toilets having about a million litres of water in them.

Effective R value and the air barrier are a lot more important than thickness or material (of course material choice factors into R value, but better materials generally hit higher R values at lesser thickness...).

Modern building codes require a vaguely reasonable R value.

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