[Greenbuilding] please rant: thar she blows

[Sacie Lambertson]

There are many reasons why Japanese don't live the way we do, many of these
cultural, but more importantly, they live in small places because the cost
of building larger is prohibitive.  The result is they use far less energy
to heat their homes per capita than do we.  Leaky or not. Right John S?

In S. Korea where we lived 20 yrs ago, most houses in the country had
several walls made essentially of paper.  I imagine quite a few of these
still exist.    Sacie L

On 4/9/07, John Straube <jfstraub at civmail.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
>
> I have worked on energy efficient houses in Japan, and the reason they
> heat
> only certain rooms is that their houses are incredibly air and heat leaky.
> A
> well insulated, airtight home will use less energy than a Japanese (and
> formerly British and New Zealand) room-by-room heater approach.  When the
> Japanese consumer finds out how comfortable and cheap it is to live in a
> R2000 or Super-E house, they don't want to live in an old Japanese house.
> Wrapping all occupied space in a good blanket of insulation is the most
> practical solution to both durability and energy efficiency
>
> Dr John Straube
> Associate Professor
> Dept of Civil Engineering & School of Architecture
> University of Waterloo
> www.johnstraube.ca
> Waterloo, Ont., Canada
> www.civil.uwaterloo.ca/beg
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: greenbuilding-bounces at listserv.repp.org
> [mailto:greenbuilding-bounces at listserv.repp.org] On Behalf Of Alan Abrams
> Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 07:56
> To: wmdorsett at sbcglobal.net; 'John Salmen'; 'Greenbuilder list'
> Subject: [Greenbuilding] please rant: thar she blows
>
>
> <John, please rant. We have a Japanese student who lives in my mother's
> apartment who said how odd it was that we Muricans heat the whole space of
> our houses. Koichi explained that in Tokyo people wear coats indoors and
> drop the temperatures of their homes to the point of seeing their breath.
> >
>
> we mur'kins were once wiser; as Ishmael observed to Queequeg, misty
> mouthed
> and huddled in a shared bed in a decrepit Nantucket rooming house on a
> blustery winter night, "to be truly warm, some part of you must be cold."
> Lisa Heshong develops that notion in her recent delightful tract, "Thermal
> Delight."
>
> But insulating the basement ceiling--a theoretically sound concept--is
> subject to the practical difficulty of insulating the stairwell and
> adjacent
> door.  As we reduce the overall footprint of the house, we fight headroom
> requirements, shaving every possible inch out of the sections of landings
> and carriages.  And as often as not, we also create habitable space in our
> basements.  So it still strikes me as reasonable to insulate the basement
> and capture the heat of the water heater and heating equipment.
>
> Alan Abrams
>
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