[Greenbuilding] What R-2000 is not (was re: please rant: thar she blows)

[David Delaney]

At 01:44 AM 13/04/2007, Christophor Faust wrote:

>  I have designed and built the two most all around sustainable buildings on the planet.  Either one will and does outperform every LEED Platinum and R2000 effort, irrespective of location or budget, ...by a lot, and most times by an order of magnitude.  I have about six years of major university research data to support a functionally sustainable deficit of 160W/m^2-yr 

It's hard to make any sense of 160W/m^2-yr.

Perhaps you mean 160 W.yr/(m^2.yr).  That's  160 x 365 x 24 W.hr/(m^2.yr) = or 1400 kWhr/(m^2.yr), or 259,000 kWh/yr (933 GJ/yr) for the 2000 ft^2 house. Probably not what you meant, since that's terrible, and much, much, worse than an R2000 house. 

How about 160 kWh/(m^2.yr)?  Thats 30,000 kWh/yr for the 2000 ft^2 house, or about 107 GJ/yr, or 81 kWh/day. Not bad, but not startling for an extreme design for the Canadian climate. I'm out of interpretations, so I'll take this one.

>whereas a pretty good number for an R2000 home is something like 20,000W/m^2-yr, or 12,500% more.

Hmm. .. 20,000W.yr/(m^2.yr) is 20,000 x 365 x 24 = 175,000 kWh/(m^2.yr), or 32 million kWh/yr  (117,000 GJ/yr) for the 2000 ft^2 house, which should actually be of the order of 200 or 300 GJ for all purchased energy. 450 times, say. too big.

If we take your statement to mean 20,000 kWh/(m^2.yr), thats 3.7 million kWh/yr for the 2000 ft^2 house, about 10,000 kWh/day. Sorry, about 100 times too big.  

Unless you meant 16 kWh/(m^2.yr) , in which case the 2000 ft^2 house uses 3000 kWh/yr of purchased energy each year, or 11 GJ,. For the R2000 house, 200 kWh/(m^2.yr) would be 37,000 kWh/yr for the 2000 ft^2 house, or 133 GJ, about 12 times as much energy as your house, 1100% more.

Phew!

David Delaney, Ottawa