[Greenbuilding] please rant: thar she blows

[John Straube]

Of course you are correct Sacie
Small buildings is the biggest reason the Japanese are more efficient.
Frugal sensible heating and cooling helps.
In North America, building smaller than we are used (eg avg house of 1800 sf
instead of 2400sf) with better than normal insulation and sane occupant
behavior can allow us to use less energy than the Japanese or Europeans. 
There is no real magic fix -- smaller homes are inherently less energy and
resource intensive, BUT, the must be well insulated and airtight, BUT they
have to be operated by sensible people who dont leave the windows open or
cool to 65 F in the summer
 
Once you have an airtight and well insulated home, it is physically
difficult to heat room by room since the heat from one room will easily flow
to another rather than out the house.
 
 
 

  _____  

From: Sacie Lambertson [mailto:sacie.lambertson at gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 11:01
To: jfstraube at uwaterloo.ca
Cc: Alan Abrams; wmdorsett at sbcglobal.net; John Salmen; Greenbuilder list
Subject: Re: [Greenbuilding] please rant: thar she blows


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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