Versions 1 and 2, Single Family, Multifamily, and Manufactured Homes
https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/zero-energy-ready-home...
Additionally, one of the photos in the featured article has the following caption:
Lopez Community Land Trust built this 561-square-foot affordable home on Lopez Island, Washington, to the high-performance criteria of DOE's Zero Energy Ready Home program that delivers a $20-per-month average monthly energy bill.
I've said for years we need to go back to more passive solar design as our baseline standard because it is both more energy efficient and more comfortable for humans. It protects the environment while improving quality of life.
It's a myth that you can't see gains in both areas.
I'm also happy to see the caption because we need to do a better job of supporting high quality of life in small towns, not just big cities. Trends in recent decades mean small towns suck because they lack services and big cities suck if you aren't one of the wealthy.
That wasn't always true and programs like this can improve and strengthen both small town and urban environments while mitigating the burden suburbs currently represent.
https://ecokit.us/passive-solar-design-vs-passive-house/#:~:....
To me, it's almost a matter of semantics.
In passive solar building design, windows, walls, and floors are made to collect, store, reflect, and distribute solar energy, in the form of heat in the winter and reject solar heat in the summer. This is called passive solar design because, unlike active solar heating systems, it does not involve the use of mechanical and electrical devices.[1]
The key to designing a passive solar building is to best take advantage of the local climate performing an accurate site analysis.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_desig...
I think of passive solar as the umbrella term for such strategies. My understanding is passive house comes from a German project. It shouldn't surprise anyone that strategies which work well in Germany differ from strategies that work in warmer climates.
There are also traditional building approaches in Middle Eastern deserts that keep the entire city at bearable temperatures. They historically built on a plateau, oriented streets to be cooled by prevailing winds etc.
Both in Mexico and Iran, they have passive air exchange systems that help cool homes. Stairwells in Victorian American homes have similar features and likely served a similar purpose and were probably not merely ostentatious.
If you know a better umbrella term for this approach, I'm open to suggestions.
It actually started in North America around the time of the oil embargo as a mechanism to reduce energy costs. (See the history section of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house). Once that shock passed, people went back to not caring.
Even at the time, and still today, most write ups are focused on harsh climates like New England or Canada in Winter, because it's harder. It's also the case that in milder climates, the cost to make your home passive has historically been higher than just paying the subsidized bills (and/or requires capital). So most of the US hasn't cared (again) until recently.
It's important that even well sealed homes have both A/C fresh air sources as well as ERV/HRV systems that can recapture the heat/cold the house has while replacing the CO2 with outside air.
I wish people would stop conflating low oxygen with high CO2.
Even at 5000 ppm CO2 (which "significantly impair" attention, executive function, and risky decision-making[0]), the oxygen has only dropped from 20.95% to 20.45%. This ~2.5% difference is negligible, equivalent to natural variations in atmospheric pressure.
The buildup of CO2 is the issue, not the depletion of O2.
Some years back, "sick building syndrome" was a prominent topic of discussion and there was a push for fresh air, windows that opened, etc. but this seems to have largely dropped off the radar, afaict.
These days, a lot of small towns don't even have a full-service grocery store and many people who want to live in a small town have to commute a long ways to get basic essential food they need.
Historically, they may also not have had a full-service grocery store, but a lot more people lived and/or worked on farms and a lot more food was sold locally, not far from where it was grown.
There are essential services that have been unraveling in recent years, making it really challenging to baseline survive in a small town in a way that wasn't always true. And it should not be true that you have a gun to your head to own a car in order to have any hope of having an adequate diet. That's just seriously problematic for individuals and even potentially threatens welfare or survival of the human race.
Something has gone very wrong that it's so hard for so many people to get a decent meal when we are awash in so much societal wealth, yet our systems for how it gets distributed and such have gotten so out of whack.
Even in rural areas you can get supermarket home delivery, it costs a few quid for the delivery but is considerably cheaper than car ownership.
Pretty much everyone has cars though.
But they’re not living/working on farms, nor are they living near where the food is grown. Our agriculture system is capable of delivering huge amounts of food for people (including the people who live near fields), but it’s not exactly trying to do that as doing that is not economically efficient.
Pretty sure they said the exact opposite of that.
“small towns suck because they lack services and big cities suck if you aren't one of the wealthy”
Low-energy house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-energy_house
List of low-energy building techniques: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_low-energy_building_te...
/? Passive solar home (tbm=isch image search) https://www.google.com/search?q=passive+solar+home&tbm=isch
/? Passive solar house: https://youtube.com/results?search_query=passive+solar+house
/? passive solar house: https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=passive%20solar%20h...
(Edit)
Maximum solar energy is on the equatorial side of the house.
Full-sun plants prefer maximum solar energy.
10ft (3m) underground it's about 75°F (24°C) all year. Geothermal systems leverage this. (Passive) Walipini greenhouses are partially or fully underground or in a hillside, but must also manage groundwater seepage and flooding; e.g. with a DC solar sump pump and/or drainage channels filled with rock.
Passive solar greenhouses (especially in China and now Canada) have a natural or mounded earthen wall thermal mass on one side, and they lower wool blankets over the upside-down wing airfoil -like transparent side at night and when it's too warm (with a ~4HP motor).
TIL an aquarium heater can heat a tank of water working as a thermal mass in a geodesic growing dome; which can be partially-buried or half-walled with preformed hempcrete block.
Round structures are typically more resilient to wind:
Shear stress > Beam shear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shear_stress
Deformation (physics) > Strain > Shear strain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformation_(physics)#Shear_st...
GH topic: finite-element-analysis https://github.com/topics/finite-element-analysis
GH topic: structural-analysis: https://github.com/topics/structural-engineering https://github.com/topics/structural-analysis
What open source software is there for passive home design and zero-energy home design?
Round house: https://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=round%20house
The shearing force due to wind on structures with corners (and passive rooflines) causes racking and compromise of structural integrity; round homes apparently fare best in hurricanes.
Earthship passive solar homes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthship
Underground living: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_living
Root cellar passive refrigeration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_cellar
Ground source heat pump (Geothermal heat pump) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_source_heat_pump
Solar-assisted heat pump: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-assisted_heat_pump
(Geothermal Power = Geothermal Electricity) != (Geothermal Heating)
Geothermal power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power
Geothermal Heating is so old, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heating
...
AC-to-DC (rectifier; GaNprime, GaN) and DC-to-AC (inverter) are inefficient conversions: it wastes electricity as heat.
Residential and Commercial AC electrical systems have a GFCI ground loop (for the ground pin on standard AC adapters)
WAV: Watts = Amps * Volts
# USB power specs (DC)
7.5w = 1.5amp * 5volts # USB
15w = 3a * 5v # USB-C
100w = 5a * 20v # USB-C PD
240w = 5a * 48v # USB-C PD 3.1
# 110v/120v AC: 15amp; Standard Residential AC in North America:
1500w = 15a * 100v # Microwave oven
1650w = 15a * 110v
1440w = 12a * 120v # AC EV charger
# 110/120 AC: 20amp
2400w = 20a * 120v # Level 1 EV charger
# 240v AC plug: Dryer, Oven, Stove, EV
4800w = 20a * 240v
7200w = 30a * 240v # Public charging station
9600w = 40a * 240v # Level 2 EV charget
14400w = 60a * 240v
120000w = 300a * 400v # Supercharger v2
120kW = 300a * 400v
1000000w = 1000a * 1000v # Megacharger
1000kW = 1000a * 1000v
1MW = 1000a * 1000v
Charging station > Charging time > charger specs table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charging_station#Charging_time
(Trifuel) generators do not have catalytic converters.
Wood stoves must be sufficiently efficient; and can be made so with a catalytic combustor or a returning apparatus (and/or thermoelectrics to convert heat to electricity).
/? Catalytic combustor (wood stove) https://www.google.com/search?q=%22catalytic+combustor%22
Wood-burning stove > Safety and pollution considerations > US pollution control requirements: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-burning_stove#US_pollutio...
Gravitational potential energy is less lossy than CAES Compressed Air Energy Storage is less lossy than thermal salt is less lossy than chemical batteries.
I think in my HN comments I'd prefer a couple of facts and a conclusion, with citations for more detail.
Makes a heck of a bunch of sense in CA or TX though.
The home may be "zero energy ready" or whatever greenwashing term they want to use. But the fact is they are spending that energy in driving from the sticks (in some cases >20 miles away) and back, driving from their home to the grocery store and back, driving to areas of interest (ie, parks, restaurants, doctors appointments).
All of this is dependent on highways and new roads, new electrical, water, and sewage infrastructure. This is all very expensive to build and maintain, and the cities and municipalities are left to foot the bill.
American housing is a Ponzi scheme and this only helps perpetuate it. We need to reverse this trend with significant investments in public transportation and other alternative forms of transportation which can scale to meet the needs of the future. We need to build vertically and re-claim back the resources allocated for car centric design (ie, highways, parking lots, parking garages, roads, street parking) and re-allocate it for more housing, businesses, and public transportation. Entities that can generate new income for the municipality and city.
In parallel, can work to preserve our existing natural green spaces and hopefully over time expand those green spaces which give us breathable air, drinkable water, protection from natural elements (ie, floods or long periods of torrential rain), and help keep viruses and other bad elements out of human populations.
It wouldn't fix the suburbs' lack of density, but it'd still be a marked improvement. It'd theoretically lighten the burden suburbs place on cities too, since there'd be a lot more corner shops and the like paying taxes.
Americans in the same situation would not have built something like Tokyo.
If you're going to bring up Tokyo you should also bring up Houston. Houston is what most American cities would look like if the people who lived there were able to build what they wanted. Most Americans want to live in detached homes that they own, and they prefer cars to public transit.
Most people just want what they're already accustomed to.
We quite literally have the power to influence that instead of just throwing our hands up and saying "well gosh Americans want terribly designed communities whose long-term costs are completely unsustainable, so I guess there's nothing we can do about it."
This isn't some immutable law of the damned universe.
Now they're getting bought up and the people are literally building houses from every end of the lot, often time getting variances for setbacks. They've decided that yards and green space are no longer important. They want wedge a three story 5K sq ft house on the same lot where a much smaller home fit.
So, I would agree and say to an extent, people are already there in terms of dealing with no lawns, now its just getting them to accept several houses on the same lot instead of their massive mcmansion.
I think we are on our way there, most new developments around here have houses that are nearly the size of the lot, with a tiny back yard and smaller front yard, and little room between houses. Developers get more money by making lots small and houses big, so there’s little incentive to have the large suburban d yards that wises to be common.
Of course, the houses are much larger than their Japanese counterparts. My Japanese mother in law thinks we are wealthy based on the size of our house, but we’re one of the smallest homes in the neighborhood,
The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there. I.e. the same spending power required to live in a house in the suburbs, or rurally, could usually be used to live in higher density living, closer to urban centers, but instead they choose to suffer long commutes and expensive transportation in order to enjoy a different lifestyle.
I think it's naive to suggest that "American housing" is a Ponzi scheme.
So I think that some of this fact that the suburbs are desirable is not necessarily completely rational, and may instead be heavily influenced by the idea that moving to suburbs is what they grew up seeing as their future (due, of course, to federal programs that incentivized suburbanization) and by auto-industry lobbying and marketing that idealizes a car-dependent lifestyle.
Obviously there will be variability and I'm sure many people enjoy a suburban/rural lifestyle more than they would a city lifestyle. But I don't know if a preference for suburban living is really part of our human nature, and I think assuming that it is can be detrimental as it can take effort away from recreating the peace and quiet and nature access in a way that is accessible to all in a more efficient urban setting.
I'm fully on-board with working to make suburbs more self-contained and walkable. As others have said, the issue may be zoning and regulations.
The fact that people dump their sewage into the creek instead of paying for proper sewage treatment/disposal suggests that there's something desirable to _them_ to do the easier and cheaper thing. Of course! The problem is externalities.
Dumping sewage into a creek is an externality that is bad.
Someone preferring to live in a suburb does not mean they're generating externalities at that level.
The very reason I pushed back on the comment was because of this black and white thinking.
Saying
> The fact that people dump their sewage into the creek instead of paying for proper sewage treatment/disposal suggests that there's something desirable to _them_ to do the easier and cheaper thing. Of course!
seems condescending to me. As though "those" people don't have the character or moral rectitude to live in the city. Maybe I'm reading in more than you intended.
"the revenue collected over time does not come near to covering the costs of meeting these long-term obligations. Development spread out over a broad area is very expensive to maintain. Over a life cycle, a city frequently receives just a dime or two of revenue for each dollar of liability... Decades into this experiment, American cities have a ticking time bomb of unfunded liability for infrastructure maintenance. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) estimates deferred maintenance at multiple trillions of dollars, but that's just for major infrastructure, not the local streets, curbs, walks, and pipes that directly serve our homes. Every mature city has a backlog of deferred maintenance, a growing list of promises with no discernible path to make good on them."
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt...
Every city has deferred maintenance and unmeetable promises, most of it is maintenance that it is more cost effective to defer. We don't need perfectly smooth streets, so defer minor maintenance makes sense. Most unmeetable promisees are things they never intended to meet.
Suburbs have existed for over 100 years. If there was a problem we would see it all over, not just in a few random ones.
Here's a list of US counties by per capita income:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_counties...
Lots of suburban countries here— Arlington, Fairfax County, Marin, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Westchester, from the ones I know at least. The only two that seem quite urban in the top 15 to me are New York County and San Francisco County.
How can you say that? Usually nice suburbs pay huge amount in taxes that subsidize urban cores.
A major reason for the preference is the lower price per square foot in the suburbs than in higher density areas. They can't afford that much space in the city, which in turn is so expensive because the amount of high density housing is artificially limited by zoning.
You have to let the market decide how much high density housing there should be before you can score "the market has decided" as a point.
I think that's a big part of it, but also people choose suburbs and rural living for reasons more to do with quality of life rather than cost.
And the Strong Towns write up that has links to more reading that I believe informed that video: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-pon...
Strong Towns has an agenda (which I mostly agree with), and in order to promote their agenda they have a straw man argument that broadly categorizes _all_ suburban development as an unsustainable venture that is borrowing against the future.
I agree that there is (in many cases, but not all) some deferred costs and externalities that are not being fully accounted for in new development.
However, I'm not nearly so pessimistic as to think that the people living in those developments won't make changes to account for those deferred costs and even possibly some of the externalities.
I think it's naive to cry "the sky is falling".
Instead, I have a 3400 sq ft house on 10,000 sq ft of land with giant trees everywhere. I'm within 2 miles of lightrail, that I will never use.
I work from home, I have a home office with a indoor, led powered garden with fresh fruit and flowers year round.
My wife works 30 minutes from home, she's a school teacher. We wanted to live closer to her school but we'd get a much smaller house with no parking and no room for the kids and dogs to play.
Again, why would I buy near or in any city? 15 minutes from downtown Denver is to close for my taste.
I love theatre, I love restaurants but honestly, I hate driving in Denver. The traffic sucks. I love driving. I love craft coffee, my house is 1 mile from the coffee factory that makes the coffee whole foods uses; I enjoy a craft coffee from that place once in a while.
Why is walkable so desired? When it's cold (like today) I don't want to leave my car. I'd drive through any day, I'd drive just to avoid walking half a mile.
Denver banned the scooters and other options from lyft and bird, so I have to lug my giant body from location to location? No thanks, I'll take my 4000 pound car to the restaurant instead.
Then I'll go home, enjoy my big beautiful yard and not worry about living in the city.
I don't go to the gym, instead I have a treadmill and a bike in my basement. If I want to do something, I just get in my car and go. I want to get a solar system and buy an electric car but so far no one will install on my style of roof
Is there a source for this? I live in Denver and am currently staring at a dozen Lyft scooters and a few bikes parked on the corner next to my apartment. Lime also operates scooters and bikes, which I usually see parked across the street at the apartments next door.
There are a few places that are geofenced (e.g. along 16th St Mall), but judging by how many people I see riding them on e.g. Cherry Creek trail as I'm biking, I don't think they're generally banned.
> Why is walkable so desired? When it's cold (like today) I don't want to leave my car. I'd drive through any day, I'd drive just to avoid walking half a mile.
This is an amazing example of the terrible disease that is Car Brain.
Instead of having a walkable city where you can walk to the shops/gym/restaurants, take convenient public transport to the theatre, and take the kids/dog to the park next door, live in a massive isolated bunker, drive your massive pickup truck to buy groceries, and wonder why the city is so congested with cars and trucks all doing the same thing. Madness.
Have you seen what condos cost? This is not true. Homeownership in walkable neighborhoods is basically reserved for plutocrats.
Clearly walkable neighbourhoods are highly desirable, and in the US people pay a massive premium to get them because they are so scarce. Yet, for some reason, new construction in the suburbs is all disconnected and almost never walkable.
There's a huge disconnect between what people want and what developers are actually building. The kind of density that leads to walkability seems to only occur in older and already expensive areas with infill development, never green field construction further from an existing city center.
Maybe it's impossible to build new walkable areas in the US.
Many people I know would rather live in the city, but the upfront cost of a house in the suburbs are much lower.
Or flight from urban crime to the suburbs then makes urban crime more likely for the remaining people, who then have more reasons to flee.
If the individual cost of buying a house "in the sticks" was reflective of that, people might start to think twice.
Is a pretty general term that's hard to respond to.
Yes there are rural subsidies, but I'm unconvinced that the per-capita subsidization of rural and suburban dwellers is so much greater than their urban counterparts.
You may have a very good argument, but I don't know the numbers, and I haven't seen anyone provide the numbers for this yet either.
For example, most of the Santa Clara Valley is suburban, consisting of subdivisions of detached homes with front yards, driveways, garages etc. But the area is definitely not rural: millions of people live here and 4 of the 5 FAANG companies are headquartered here.
You could say similar things about LA, or the areas outside Chicago and NYC, etc. They are definitely suburban, and definitely not rural.
I don't buy that subsidization is what makes buying a house "in the sticks" so much cheaper.
That's not generally how this works. There aren't necessarily highways and new paved roads going to rural properties. Electrical service isn't only downtown in cities but for miles outside of them or from solar, propane, or any one of the many other technologies.
As everyone who has built a property outside of some service area knows, the homeowner is the one who pays to drop the lines or service to the properety. Water almost always comes from a well on the property, and sewage tanks are how the sewage are handled.
Later, if Frank & Martha's property gets annexed into the city, they will pay taxes and will be just as entitled to city services as others. They already pay county, state and other taxes, which means they are entitled to whatever their taxes pay for.
"In general, rural areas in the United States have higher homeownership rates than urban areas. Compared with urban areas, where the homeownership rate was 59.8 percent, rural areas had a homeownership rate of 81.1 percent." [1]
[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/...
I've read recently that as of right now, if you're more than 1000 yards from the branch point the electrical company would run wire from, it is already cheaper to go fully off-grid. Not 100% true that this is true or at least universally applicable, but the curves all point in that direction.
I don't know exactly how many yards the breakeven point is. However, from what I've seen it is almost always monetarily cheaper to create your own services when possible - unless a neighbor has paid for services to get really close. It might make sense for neighbors to pool money for pulling services out. It all depends on the specifics, right?
If you're 20 miles outside a town, you almost certainly have electrical service, but are on a well and septic system. City water and sewer doesn't make sense at those sort of densities. You also probably have the land to easily put a nice ground mount PV array in, and grow a good bit of your own food, should you care to.
A typical suburban subdivision will have city water and sewage, though depending on the details, you might have a couple community wells and individual septic fields (or a link to city sewage).
Highly efficient low density housing has a place. So does high density housing.
Everything you say about improving urban development practices is valid, but doesn’t mean that efforts to improve suburban/exurband/rural development are problematic. They’re all inextricably part of the future and they all have their own development needs.
The skyscrappers that we see in our skylines are not even the majority of what we see. A lot of place will benefit from being 3-4 stories tall.
A lot of space that is developed is hugely wasted, devoted to storing cars, or roads to facilitate car movement. Meanwhile, a human being is very compact in comparison.
Walmart and Kroger like having big operationally efficient stores that they can operate like all their other stores, and can’t scale their model well to oddball village locations. So they make or buy a big building with a giant parking lot and underprice all the local stores with their hyperoptimized business model until the village is dead.
At that point, there’s nothing left to do in your dense housing district and everybody needs a car anyway, so you may as well have some breathing room and a garage.
If people want suburban density, it won’t come from zoning changes (although that will help urban density) — it’ll come from somehow making village commerce more economical. But good luck getting that kind of effort past national-retail lobbyists!
Ultimately, again, the fact is that urban development issues are different than the issues in other areas and the solutions don’t need to come at the expense of each other or in competition with each other.
What if this was done this brownfield development in areas with existing infrastructure? New development doesn't need to be coupled with sprawl. There is a significant amount of multifamily development that looks exactly like that. The IRA also included large incentives for the retrofit of the existing housing stock.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-10/DOE%20ZER...
This is shockingly dumb. Please lookup the definition of a Ponzi scheme.
First, you do know that when you get a house you actually get the house, right? That’s the value residents extract from the house. Whether my parents could resell their house was only relevant when they needed to, big shocker, move to a different house in another area. Apart from leaving something for inheritance the re-sale value was irrelevant to the utility. That’s antithetical to a Ponzi scheme.
Second, anyone can build more housing and there is tons of land to keep building in 90% of the country. That doesn’t work in a Ponzi scheme if the real value that sets the price is margin that can be captured by builders.
People in the U.S. won't be living in dystopian China-style 40 floor housing anytime soon, in ways that is sounds like you're hoping for with dense city living.
There are many small towns in Europe surrounded by networks of even smaller towns and one or two house farms. There is nothing to claim back there: they've been like that since well before any European moved to the Americas. That was a way to be close to fields, when economy was mostly farmers and herders and people mostly walked or at best moved in animal powered carts.
Some people move from there to big cities now, some people move from big cities to there. Everybody has a car, it can't be helped. I think that people in big cities will end up with public transport and few cars, but people in small towns and in the fields or in the hills or mountains will keep having a car, maybe just use it less if it costs too much.
Some people take the train, but that isn't always convenient, especially with strikes! Your boss doesn't care that you were 3 hours late due to a bus skipping out on work. Your paycheck cares a lot though.
Back in America, most people I knew lived and worked in the same general region/city. Perhaps this is a uniquely Dutch problem owing to the size of the country, but I don't see how they can reduce car usage without significantly more investment in public transportation. By the looks of the current state of the government, that's not going to happen anytime soon.
This isn't a uniquely Dutch problem. The longest commute you mentioned:
Utrecht -> Eindhoven: 1 hr 4 min (92.2 km)
isn't unheard of in the US. These are the commutes for a cousin, and a friend's uncle:
Colorado Springs, CO -> Denver, CO: 1 hr 19 min (113.5 km)
New Britain, CT -> New York, NY: 2 hr 4 min (177.1 km)
These are memorable though because they are so long. Many of the people I know have far shorter commutes. For example, my mom would drive 30 min (21km). But, these long commutes definitely exist.
In 2019, 10% of US workers had a 1-way commute of over 1hr. (The average times for transit are quite high in the US, but 90% of commutes are by car so a large portion of that 10% are by car).
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
In 2003, 8% of 1-way commutes were over 56 km.
what a privileged life style one must have. you realize that there are entire metro areas where you can drive in 20 miles in any direction and still be in urban environment, yeah?
also, thinking 20 miles is just oh so far away is so outside of my world experience that I just don't easily understand your situation of think that it is so far away. clearly, you and I have grown up in totally different situations, and it is interesting to me that one can be so restricted in their movement and consider that normal just as you clearly think anyone traveling > 20 miles is just from Neptune or something.
i'll chalk this up to a nature vs nurture kind of experience
Huh? Where did you get this nugget of wisdom from? We have great relationships with almost all of the neighbors I can see from my porch. It's called community. I've lived in urban high rises and known fewer neighbors.
It doesn't make sense as a description of where people live, but [English] language rarely makes sense.
Thanks for your reply.
Look, I hate Single Family Housing as much as anyone - but roads are BY FAR the most expensive part of infrastructure you mentioned - and those are financed by gasoline taxes.
If the people in the sticks are buying a lot of gas, they're paying a lot more taxes for the roads, too.
It'd be nice if property taxes were slightly higher in suburban areas to make up for the higher costs - but it really wouldn't need to be that much higher. Houses usually cost more than condos - so you're paying more property tax already by having a more expensive home...
Sure, there's exceptions like condos in Manhattan and near the beach and ski resorts, etc...
https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
This is a common misunderstanding of how roads are funded. Roads are not solely funded by gas taxes and are predominantly paid for by funds raised from sources other than gas taxes.
I don't think that's true. Gasoline taxes aren't high enough to pay for roads.
https://frontiergroup.org/resources/who-pays-roads/
It seems as of 2015, 50% of road related costs came out of general taxes. And as gas taxes have remained fairly constant, while roads have become more expensive to repair as they get worse, I can only think that number has gone up since then.
Note that in the context of the "half came from gas taxes," the article is only talking about highway funding. Local road funding isn't covered by Fed gas taxes at all.
Do you have any sources for that? I'm in Australia, where fuel costs about twice what it does in the US. A decent portion of that is taxes/duties, but road spending is taken from consolidated revenue, and fuel taxes ultimately contribute a minority of the spending on roads. So unless the cost of fuel production is massively lower in the US, something doesn't add up.
Notably, though, the HTF spends more than it earns in gas tax revenue; the shortfall comes from the general fund. And also Federal highway spending does not cover all highway spending; the rest comes from the states[1][3]. Federal highway spending also does not cover local roads at all.
[1]: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/images/full-reports/...
[2]: (Above image from https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57138 )
Why would you hate the only kind of housing worth living in?
I would end up in a mental institution if forced to live in a multi family home.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN...
If Hackernews believed in god, surely this would be their idea of heaven.
I've got a large ground mount solar install I put in a few years ago (15.9kW nameplate, though mostly east-west facing panels so a bit less annual production than you'd expect, just more "sunup to sundown" production), and it's been a chilly winter, so with an air source heat pump and keeping the house fairly cool, I'm still net +4MWh from the grid in the last 4 months.
Meanwhile, when it warms up a bit more, I'm generating 10x what the house uses during spring/fall mornings (10+ kW production on a sub-1kW house draw for long periods of the day). It's not a big deal with only a few people on the grid, but if every house were doing this, it would be a very big problem for grid stability.
I've also got experience with the off-grid lifestyle, as my office is 100% off-grid/standalone, and I don't pretend that system is cheap. Just neat. And even with 5kW of solar hung for a ~100 sq ft shed, I still need propane or a generator in the winter every now and then to keep things sane in here.
When the price of power drops to zero in the spring/fall, you can be sure there will be plenty of people lapping it up to smelt aluminium, make glass, make steel, make cement, liquify air, make hydrogen, etc.
When the price of power is high in the winter, companies will swoop in with gas turbines, power cables from other places, and extra insulation to keep houses warm with lower energy costs. Entrepreneurs will see this coming, and will be there ready to provide power or power-saving measures to those who did not prepare.
As long as the market can set a price, the market will solve each problem. The people to lose out will be customers who don't adapt to keep their costs down - for example those who heat their 1960's uninsulated home with electric baseboard heaters.
There are already plenty of seasonal industries - like tourism. Power hungry industries will become seasonal or migratory too.
Electricity will have to become orders of magnitude more expensive for this to be true. After you've bought the building, the smelter, and the guy to operate it, the cost of electricity to smelt aluminum is negligible. Its never going to make sense to leave all that idle if the cost of electricity bumps up a few cents.
Note, the above is as of 10 years ago. Now wind provides most electric so hours may be different to account for that.
Electricity is the biggest expense in aluminium production. There is a reason it is nicknamed "solid electricity".
I don't have your faith in markets though. The invisible hand is a potent force indeed, but it's just as likely to flip you the bird as it is to solve a problem that you have. There's nothing about a market, for instance, that knows to keep prices high enough to prevent the wintertime aluminum smelters from burning all the stored energy and causing a humanitarian crisis a month later when there's not enough to weather a blizzard.
Imagine you see all the power being used up ahead of winter, and you predict this problem... Yet it seems like nobody else has noticed...
So you swoop in and, with profits in mind, you buy up some electricity futures contracts for December. They're quite cheap right now, and you suspect that when the blizzard hits they'll be really valuable. By doing so, you push the price of them up a bit.
Meanwhile, Fred over at the hydro plant sees that futures contracts for electricity are higher in December than now, so he'll make more money by switching off the generators now and using that water later in December when he'll get paid more for it.
Bob at the aluminium smelter sees that spot prices for power now are higher (because the hydro shut off), and futures prices suggest they'll be even higher in December too. So it's probably more profitable to shutdown the plant for repairs now, and restart production next year.
See how you noticing this problem started a chain of events that solved the problem? That's the power of markets - they can use the collective knowledge and intelligence of all the participants to solve a problem.
A passive house can have 10% the energy cost/use of a regular "code" house. Even off grid, this can immensely help in the size of your battery required.
As others have noted, passivhaus standards would help fix the "in the winter, homes use a lot more energy than they can generate" part of this. I've read of homes in Scandanavia that are heated by their inhabitants plus the output equivalent of a few candles. Not totally convinced by these stories, but they point the way: once you've got the carbon-reduced/free energy supply in place, work on massively (if possible) reducing how much of it you need.
We have an old adobe in the high desert, and it is so far from passivhaus as to be a joke. I'm fairly sure that if this was built to passivhaus standards, even our currently undersized array could handle the heating needs.
We were generating a surplus, so we installed an electric clothes dryer, which seems to have balanced everything nicely.
Is that the "fundamental" problem being solved, though? Or is it just an externality that needs to be addressed? It seems like the "fundamental" problem here is trying to maximize deployment of renewable generation, and that construction like this is a great step in that direction. (Not the least of which because it pushes the investment required onto consumers willing to bear the costs, and "generates jobs" in the process. Siting a new wind farm is a ton more complicated, and let's not even talk about the difficulty of installing a scratch-built reactor.)
I mean, it's true, that at the end of the day home energy generation is just PV solar, and PV solar doesn't behave like gas plants and that needs to be addressed at the grid level. But that's not an argument against PV solar, it's just an engineering problem.
It can certainly be an argument against residential rooftop solar.
In general, "industrial solar" (ground mount, high voltage strings, single axis trackers) is sub-$1/W installed. Residential rooftop solar is still $2.50-$4/W depending on where you are, because it has quite a few additional requirements (per-panel rapid shutdown in NEC 2017, various other requirements on the panel and interconnects that add cost), and, often, poor siting from partial shading reasons (chimneys, vent stacks, trees, other bits of roof, etc).
I don't mind making homes more suited to solar (oversize the main busbar with a "solar ready" panel, route conduit up to the roof, require all vent stacks be on the north side of the roof), but it's a rather uncontrolled solution that's of limited "actually solving the problem" use. Low levels of penetration are easy to deal with, higher levels start to get really hard, when you've got whole subdivisions shifting from "lots of production" to "lots of consumption" as clouds go over.
Or, we get used to less reliable, more intermittent energy again, and a lot of the problems go away. Just, that generates other problems.
The power grid is a lot more fragile than most people assume.
Well, yeah. So pick the low hanging fruit and sell it to the FAANG hippies. I still fail to see the problem here. No one is promoting rooftop solar as a one-stop-shop trip to renewable utopia, just as a effective and immediately deployable generation mechanism in a regulatory environment not well-suited to agile and rapid solutions of any kind.
If we get to the point where the hippies are buying up all the panels and the grid solutions can't get them cheap enough, that's the time to start complaining. Not now.
No, that's silly. Build the panels. Build the solar. Fix the externalities, but absolutely pick the low hanging fruit. Every panel on a hippie's home means less total joules needed elsewhere.
To be blunt: the kind of argumentation you engage in is absolutely toxic, and HN is awash in it. Engineers love to scream about perfect solutions, but real engineering is about tradeoffs. And folks here are absolutely terrible, just really, genuinely shit-tier, at discussing them rationally.
[1] Depending on locale, obviously. In e.g. Arizona it's probably much closer to 80-90%
https://www.sevarg.net/tag/solar2020/ documents the build. My frames are timber, though a neighbor built a very similar system with metal frames and 72 cell panels, and got his costs down quite a bit further - he's around $1/W installed, mine was somewhat higher at about $1.50/W (more expensive panels and a good bit more expensive frame setup).
If you can weld, and find used pipe to build your frames with, you should be able to do sub-$1/W for a DIY install.
Thermal mass storage requires a lot of mass to do anything useful, or the ability to run exceedingly high temperatures. Or a phase change. Molten salt storage can store a lot of energy, but you're at "very hazardously hot" temperatures with "stuff that's mind-bogglingly corrosive when hazardously hot." It's not the sort of thing most people would want to mess with at home. Myself included, and my tolerance for experimentation is pretty darn high.
"Renewable is great, but if we're already generating all our power by renewables then..."
This argument is silly because we are nowhere close to having this problem yet. And as we start to approach that golden age (I mean, "problem") we'll have other alternatives.
I'll consider one of those if I have to replace my unit at some point, but I'm far more interested in adding simple solar thermal collectors to directly add energy from the sun on the partly cloudy or clear days we have, vs ripping up half an acre of rock to put the loops in, or figuring out where I can punch another well for heat exchange.
A 1800W hair dryer running constantly is 1.3MWh/mo, and this isn't 4MWh/mo, it's since about Nov, on a colder than usual winter. I'm right on the north end of Zone 5.
In any case, I've yet to figure out how to get our heat pump outdoor unit from freezing up in icing fog, but neither is it worth $20k to put a ground source unit in right now.
We will be able to run power-hungry industries (e.g. steel-aluminum/smelting) for very little cost.
> And even with 5kW of solar hung for a ~100 sq ft shed, I still need propane or a generator in the winter every now and then to keep things sane in here.
What about a large thermal mass wood/pellet stove? There's plenty of wood waste floating around that could heat a small house/shed in the couple of winter months when the solar panels don't do the job.
I'm grandfathered into an arrangement where I pay my $5/mo and get unlimited net metering, but it's not remotely reasonable to pretend that I'm not heavily using the grid overnight, in the winter, etc.
The aluminium smelter can heat to x+250°, let things cool to x° while people cook their evening meal, then heat up again afterwards.
A large supermarket chain can set their refrigerators to 5°, but by allowing the range to move between 3° and 7° can save significant power. (One of the big British supermarkets already does this.)
This is actually a really good thing, I think. The minimum airflow rating these houses have to meet is of course going to be suboptimal, but the hard part of airproofing is already done and it’s easy for the homeowner to simply beef up the heat exchanger and air pump to get ideal airflow. The homeowner can also install an air quality filter on the airpump and now their entire house has filtered air. Great way to get that PM2.5 level down to where it should be!
Insulation and a heat pump is pretty much as good as it gets right now
The barriers are not materials, technology, or labor, but purely regulatory.
I could take my current home off permanently grid with solar today for less than 10k but to do so would be illegal.
Permitted grid connected solar costs 5x that and disconnecting from the grid is not permitted.
Friends have lived off-grid in the Yukon in a very nice house for 20 years.
It's hard to get house insurance when you're not on the grid, and whenever they get asked about it, they ask the insurance person on the phone "When was the last time you had a power outage?" (inevitably the answer is sometime in the last month or three - the power grid in the Yukon is a fickle thing).
In 20 years, they've never had a single second of power outage in their very nice off grid house.
I've seen a few people quoted more than 500K for PG&E to run power to their house. That can buy a lot of redundancy and peace of mind. Similarly, many cities have power outages longer than 24 hours on an annual basis in California. At this point most people in my neighborhood have gas generators for when the grid goes out.
Before home generation, everyone needed both. The cost of the infrastructure was amortized over all of the customers. As it turned out, rich people used more power, so by having a single charge just based on usage but that covered the cost of both usage and the grid, rich people subsidized poor people.
But the home solar came along, and the rich people started getting it. So now the power companies have a problem. They still have to maintain all of that grid infrastructure, whether you're connected to it or not, and they need rich people to subsidize it.
The could have simply split the bill up and put the infrastructure on the property tax bill and then just charge people for their actual usage, but that would be complicated and would reveal how much they pay for each part.
So instead they lobbied for laws that don't let you go off grid and force you to pay a minimum "connection fee" each month.
In the context of the OP, which is a federal agency, whether or not you can build a house that is disconnected from the electrical grid is determined first by your local laws, and secondly by your state laws. You can certainly build houses in the US that aren't on the electrical grid, demonstrating that there's no federal prohibition against it.
Why not treat them as independent problems - an off-grid solar system for most of your electricity, while also maintaining a nominal (/backup) grid connection? If your home is already connected to the grid, then I would think the ongoing cost would be minimal and could be viewed as just another tax.
Or if you can get away with having a power inlet on your off grid system and powering that system from the grid with an extension cord during temporary backup/maintenance conditions only, go for that.
For my own AHJ, grid interconnect has nothing to do with whether permits/licenses are required (and for homeowner work, they're not). So an off-grid system and grid-connected are under the same requirements there regardless. A grid-tie system that can feed back power to the grid requires additional signoff/agreement with the POCO though.
(I'm very sympathetic to the situations where the utility will demand some stiff fee to build out a grid connection to a new residence, while local regulations require this connection for occupancy. But this isn't what you described)
Wait, what? What happens if you just don't pay your bill?
Edit: Or just disconnect internally, meaning you use no power.
This is different. Many municipalities specifically require all dwellings to have basic utilities (water, sewer, electricity, garbage service), even if you're not using them. Not having that will get you in trouble pretty quickly.
Unincorporated areas are usually fair game.
Disconnecting from the grid - that sounds like there's some kind of clause in the area that you live that essentially ties you to the utility. You must live in on the pacific coast or SW.
EDIT: To all the responses - I'm talking off grid as in all functionality. Sure you can add solar / solar thermal etc though in many places it isn't cost effective and doesn't make a lot of sense in a city where the alternative is that those costs are defrayed across a large base that provides reliability and service. I don't have much love for utilities but they do provide a valuable service.
I'm all for it where it makes sense but it isn't a blanket statement.
Everyone has a use for hot water. You can always have off-grid solar heating an auxiliary tank to take the load off the primary water heater.
You are talking about incremental improvements.
New bulk panels can be be purchased as low as $0.7/w or $7,000 for 10 kw nameplate. You can get 10kwh of lead acid batteries for another 2 grand, a 10kw combo MPPT for ~1 grand or a 10KW charge controller + 5 KW AC inverter for the same.
I'm out of budget so I guess I'm racking with 2x4s and using chicken wire for cabling, but you get the point
So you need to prevent cold surfaces. The best way to do that is improving the insulation. The reason you can see water drops in the windows is precisely because they are inadequately insulated (e.g. only double paned).
Now, it's true that if you make an airtight home, then you need some kind of air exchange. And if it's really cold outside, then even if it's wet, once that air is warmed up, it ends up at a low relative humidity. In that case you need a humidifier. I guess depending on the outside air, you'd probably need both to stay in a comfortable range.
Edit: Sorry, I can see that you're aware of these. Perhaps my point is just that all standard houses where I live in cold climate uses vapor barriers. Moisture control is part of the building code. Trying to solve the problem with overly dry air does not make sense to me - the whole point of a house is making a comfortable living space.
I agree subsidizing new homes doesn't seem necessary. This is simple to enforce in building codes. Defined efficiency limits for construction and building components (e.g. requiring triple glazing and 12in insulation in all walls) would be trivial to mandate and it's as reasonable in Florida as it is in Maine.
It's a daffy one-sided approach that is unsustainable.
This seems more like "I want you to feel good about your purchase while you're still dependent on external energy inputs."
If you can find details on what it actually requires, please, share, because I've spent the past 15 minutes snoofing around and I sure can't find it.
I think the government could create regulation to fix the incentives here. Something like allowing enhanced energy efficiency to be paid over time by creating a lien on the house that a new homeowner has to continue to make payments towards.
> A DOE Zero Energy Ready Home is a high-performance home that is so energy efficient that a renewable energy system could offset most or all the home's annual energy use
And now I still don't know. What is a 'high-performance home'? And what exactly is the criterium to decide if 'a renewable energy system could offset most or all the home's annual energy use'?
Last, well insulated homes can get cheap heating and cooling from modestly sized heat pumps which are very efficient. One zero energy home I saw has heat exchangers on the roof to capture energy from the sun for warm water as well, supplemented by heat pumps powered by photovoltaics.
There is a new system that before drywall goes up, they pressurize the house and spray a caulk in the air that finds its way to all the pinhole leaks and seals them to further reduce air leaks during the building process.
This is quite nice regardless. Houses are unlikely to be so drafty that the air inside is always fresh, and a real ventilation system will deliver fresh, filtered air all the time.
> You also need a makeup air vent for things like a stove hood.
You need this anyway, at least in CA, if your hood exceeds 400cfm, and it’s probably a good idea regardless. Sadly, high end hoods seem to mostly have way too much airflow, and decent makeup air systems are rare and complex.
Oh good they finally figured that out. Cause that's where you want the stuff. And insulating a bunch cavities is labor intensive.
Insulating cavities needs some skilled labor if you use mineral wool, but a skilled installer goes fast. Or you can use some kind of blown in product, which takes very little labor. (I have never seen competently installed fiberglass batts. I’m not sure they really exist.)
The goal is to transition to housing which can be powered by renewables. To that end there are requirements for the thermal integrity of the envelope and windows, there must be electric run for HVAC heat pumps, hot water heat pumps, and at least one EV parking space. Lighting must be modern high efficiency stuff. Ductwork must be inside the thermal envelope. There are indoor air quality standards to meet.
> A DOE Zero Energy Ready Home is a high-performance home that is so energy efficient that a renewable energy system could offset most or all the home's annual energy use.
"Most or all" and "annual energy use" allow for some massive wiggle room. Annual energy use by who? A family with a couple teenage girls is going to likely use a lot more hot water than a family with a three year old boy.
I can't find any actual concrete details on it, annoyingly. So I have to agree that it's more of a feel-good listing until proven otherwise.
It could of course be much more aggressive, and likely will be eventually, but if you had a ACH2 house with those insulation values, minimum U-0.3 windows, >0.94 efficient gas furnace / high quality heat pumps, it would be a very efficient house.
Table R402.1.2 here: https://codes.iccsafe.org/content/IECC2015/chapter-4-re-resi...
> … Zero Energy Ready Homes (ZERH) their standard offering. To this point, our ZEHR program …
Sometimes acronyms get too cute, but there’s value to something that can easily be said in conversation or in one’s head while writing
They also tend to be purchased by people who don't care in the slightest about energy efficiency, because if you can buy a $10M home, the difference between $500/mo or $1500/mo in energy costs doesn't matter to you.
1: https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/5-things-you-should-kno...
The best proven heat insulator when it comes to building a home is earth itself, that's why for hundreds to thousands of years dug-out huts have been the norm on several continents, for different cultures/civilisations. Granted, you cannot build a macmansion-like house using only earth+some wood.
And for that the houses made (partially) out of earth itself are pretty good. You have to be careful not to allow water infiltrations, but other than that those houses are pretty durable, even against earthquakes (my grandpa from my mother's side used to live in one).
>Most of the residents there lived in yaodongs—artificial caves in loess cliffs—which collapsed and buried alive those sleeping inside. Modern estimates put the direct deaths from the earthquake at over 100,000, while over 700,000 migrated away or died from famine and plagues, which summed up to a total loss of 830,000 people in Imperial records.[3][4][5] It was the deadliest recorded earthquake in history, and in turn one of the deadliest natural disasters in Chinese history.[6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1556_Shaanxi_earthquake
You might also ask people in Turkey, where at least 50,000 people have died so far, what they think of masonry structures.
Apart from CA and maybe some other parts further North where is that earthquake zone? Seriously asking.
Further reading:
https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/nearly-half-america...
Builders themselves are slow to adopt new technology vs. do what they’ve always done. Part of that is because it’s hard to learn news things. Part of it is because new things have lots of unknown and builders shoulder that risk.
As long we we keep building & being forced to live in low density, single-family houses, we'll keep consuming the huge physical and energy resources necessary to sustain them.
I'm not saying we have to turn every neighborhood into manhattan, far from it. But this is similar to the gas -> electric car change. Yeah, it's a marginal improvement on what we're doing now, but its so far away from the kind of changes we need to make that it's almost dispiriting to see it presented as some kind of remarkable progress.
>
There are several core technologies and products that go into creating a Zero Energy Ready Home. These include:
Advanced insulation materials: These materials are used to reduce heat loss and gain through walls, roofs, and floors. Examples of advanced insulation materials include spray foam insulation, rigid foam insulation, and blown-in cellulose insulation.
High-performance windows: These windows are designed to minimize heat loss and gain and to improve comfort and natural lighting. They typically have low-e coatings, multiple panes, and insulated frames.
Efficient heating, cooling, and ventilation systems: These systems use advanced technologies to reduce energy consumption and provide a comfortable indoor environment. Examples include geothermal heat pumps, air-source heat pumps, and energy recovery ventilation systems.
Solar panels: These panels are used to generate renewable energy and can be installed on the roof or integrated into the building envelope. They can provide enough energy to power the home and even send excess energy back to the grid.
Energy-efficient appliances and lighting: These products use less energy than conventional models and can help further reduce energy consumption in the home.
Building automation systems: These systems allow homeowners to control and monitor energy use and other home systems remotely, which can help optimize energy efficiency and comfort.
Producers of these products include a variety of companies, from large multinational corporations to smaller regional manufacturers. Some examples of companies that produce products for Zero Energy Ready Homes include Owens Corning and Johns Manville for insulation, Andersen and Marvin for windows, Carrier and Lennox for HVAC systems, SunPower and Tesla for solar panels, and Nest and Ecobee for smart thermostats. There are many other companies and products available, and choosing the right ones depends on factors such as climate, building design, and budget.
>
It doesn't answer any of the specific questions about what's specifically different in a Zero Energy Ready Home from something Energy Star rated, and it's filled with weasel words and vague handwaving statements.
I could nitpick the response further against the actual PDF linked elsewhere in the thread, but there's no particular point.
