Also as someone who lived outside for over a decade, you just get used to a broader range of temperatures. Also, when it gets too hot to do things you stop doing things. Modern life doesn't like the idea of needing to relax and conserve energy but that's what you have to do when it's hot. It's not just a matter of finding ways to make being comfortable more eco friendly, it's an entire mentality shift that needs to happen within our culture.
Yup, as a bicycle commuter in an office/city that is not super bicycle friendly I am one of 2 to 3 people who get here via bike. Everybody complains about the heat in the walk from the car to the building I'm FL summer. If you actually spend time outside your body adjusts to it, I get to work after 11.6 miles of riding my bike barely breaking a sweat (80ish in the morning, in the 100 degree ride home Def am sweating)
@@g00fysmiley as a bicycle commuter in Texas I can relate. Although when it's 90 in the morning I do get a little perspiration. In the winter everyone is freezing but it's only in the lower 60s or upper 50s and I think it's fine because when you get moving your muscles warm you up
Another very interesting thing that makes houses more efficient when it comes to heating and cooling is being surrounded by deciduous trees. Some people in Greece have started doing that, and it's actually a super interesting solution. During the winter, they shed their leaves, exposing the house to the sun as much as possible. Then, during the spring they green again and provide natural shade throughout the summer. Not only do they benefit cooling and heating, but their shade is more pleasant to sit under than artificial structures, along with having other benefits of having trees in your garden.
@@jakesalvadori6852 Well, I'm no architect/civil engineer, so I can't comment on that. But if the issues with planting those trees are surmountable, I can't see why you wouldn't want them.
Can be a great solution but takes time to grow the trees to a useful size for this. Also you have to find the right type of tree. Not all trees grow and drop leaves at the same time of year and can be affected by weird climate changes too. Still trees are Awesome!!
If you want to read a bit more about this in the context of the US, "Compound Climate and Infrastructure Events: How Electrical Grid Failure Alters Heat Wave Risk" by B.Stone and E.Mallen is a good starting point. It is only 8 pages and compares 2 strategies across 3 cities. The relevant bit is that which high-albedo (reflectivity) roofing helps older, single story, single family homes a lot more than canopy coverage, canopy coverage offers a lot of other benefits as well. Better air quality, improvements to mental health and opinion of residents of their own neighborhood, etc. But to quote the paper, "Other recent work has found each one percent increase in urban tree canopy to be associated with a reduction in temperatures of 0.14 and 0.2 degrees Celsius in arid and humid climates, respectively." 0.14 and 0.2 might seem like very little, but a 5-7% increase in canopy coverage reducing temps by an average of 1 degree Celsius is huge. Anyway, it's a short, if technical read. Highly recommend checking it out.
Having grown up in the South it's interesting that there definitely was a housing type that was common in the South. HIgh 9-10ft ceilings, a central hallway with doors on either end that you could open to allow pass through breezes. Transoms over each hallway door to allow ventilation. Big windows along the sides of the houses that allowed cross-ventilation. Even the use of extensive porches, sometimes completely around the house so that walls and windows were shaded. Then there was also the sleeping porch, which was a large screened in porch that was open on two or three sides, so during the heat of the summer, the family could move their beds out to the sleeping porches where it was cooler with more of a breeze.
Some of those features have continued into the modern era, most people don't understand why they were there but continue using the design elements but they lose practical purposes by not being incorporated into the design correctly. I live in a 100 year old house in south Georgia and for the most part you just described it lol. This house is built in one of the oldest sections of town and used to have a guest house (now a separate residence) and on dirt roads. It amazing how much has changed
The original Asian Indian ..bungalow with verandas and wooden blinds on the windows and long overhanging eves was a solution adopted across the British empire .. Passive cooling and thermal control have been used for millennia.. we were dumb and forgot to adapt our fashion homes... now its time to re learn .
Must be a good neighborhood. No thieves muggers or people with shanks shanking people in their sleep on their sleeping porches. Must be nice to live away from the cities.
What? No... just no. Most of the architecture on built-in-place homes in the south (and elsewhere) today is a melange of elements common to houses built all over the US. This is a practical consideration based on what material suppliers can provided in terms of roofing, siding, and millwork. Many design elements that are hallmarks of southern homes simply aren't available unless you have a custom home built. Even then, many structural features are disallowed by modern building codes due either to fire safety, hurricane building codes, or energy building codes. The Modern Era ended 70 years ago. Your house was actually built towards the end of the Late Modern era. We absolutely do not build houses like that any more.
My house has thick adobe walls, high ceilings, domed roofs, double windows (small ones, up high in the main rooms) and rooftops painted bright white. It’s always 10 to 12 degrees cooler than outside. I have to close up in the morning and open in the cool of the evening. There’s no air conditioning except for ceiling fans, which are rarely used. I designed it using common sense and observing what worked for other people here. I like my house very much. I’m on the Mexican high desert plateau.
My parents moved in their new low energy passive house in 1998. It does not have air condition. It only has 9 kW heating, which is turned on for 2x2 hours each day to provide warm water. And it is cool in the summer and warm in the winter. It mainly gets heated by a large south-facing window, which can be shaded easily in the summer. Its sun shade made from sailcloth. No fancy electric jalousies or similar stuff. Just 40'x20' of fabric, two wooden poles and some elastic bands to span it over the terrace. It was $200 of initial investment and zero operational cost.
@@MrDudebud1 It's on the front page of the enginering company which managed the construction site at the time, Gildebau. I don't know how URLs in comments are handled here, so I would ask you to search for the company online. There is no YT video though. The house was finished seven years before YT's foundation after all.
@SiqueScarface YT does allow you to post links in chats. And can you please, since when I type in gildebau engineering/homes/etc. into Google, I can't find it. You may have filters in place so it isn't working for me
In Australia we have a town called Coober Pedy. The temperatures regularly get over 50C (122F). The whole town is built underground in what started out as abandoned opal mines. If you wanted a new room you just carefully dug one out. Heating and cooling are generally not required and the only electricity needed is for appliances. This is mostly obtained from solar or wind generation these days but was once from diesel generators.
@@rm-gh1co They (and most of the world) are fine - the soil and rock doesn't contain the mineral that breaks down to release radon. It's something to check for when buying or building since in radon prone areas, you can "solve" the problem by ventilating the basement (Modern air-tight houses concentrate the radon to dangerous levels)
Having that off-the-grid, self-sustaining smart home is such a cool concept. Everything from smart architectural design to aquaponic gardens and solar roofs. I could watch hours of content that covers that.
It is also something that fewer and fewer people can afford. Buildings like the "Eastgate Center" ref: 8:08 are a better alternative, but like projects have been fare from cheap buildings.
You will need to replace the batteries every 5 years so there will be batteries to recycle. Oh and where do you get the material for the batteries and the solar panels? Hmmm maybe mining oh wait we can't mine creates CO2.
There's a kindergarden down the street here (a few kilometers north of downtown Oslo) where they built it as an "active house". Even though this is pretty far north compared to where you are, this house produces more energy over a year than it spends, which is sent back to the grid. Pretty neat ;)
My grandpa built their house with a passive cooling idea. It sits on a very large concrete pad (like could hold up a 10 story building big) and had the entire front of the house be a massive 2 story sunspace that draws in air. Essentially it can be 90 outside and feel like a nice 72 indoors. Same goes for winter which is common in the PNW. No AC at all in the building, just a couple electric heaters under window sills.
@@flatsixx it’s hard to explain. AFIAK he made the house himself, the only part he didn’t make was the foundation, which weren’t originally to his specifications so he was ready to take the company to court if they didn’t redo it. It’s funny because the concrete foundation my dad said it strong enough to hold a 5 story building, and when a 4.7 earthquake went off years ago my grandma didn’t feel a thing. Every single wall and even the floor is cross beamed and the amount of beams was double and the thickness of the beams was near double so when you walk even on the second story if doesn’t feel like you’re walking in a wood house, it feels like steel and concrete, it’s that solid. My dad helped my grandpa build it in the 80s when wood was cheap, he even put massive inch thick trim on the doors so it’s basically impossible to tear out door hinges without removing everything, I had to drill out a lock once because of that, there was no way to fiddle with the bolt. As for the ventilation design, I’m still a little confused by it, but I just know that when it’s hot out the sunspace which is basically the entire front of the house (with a rafter floor on the 2nd floor to walk around on) the sunspace heats up and the rest of the house will stay cool, and when it cools down I open up the windows on the side and rear of the house and the doors to the sunspace (the bedrooms on the 2nd floor sit behind the sunspace with doors for access) and there’s a flow of air that moves from the back of the house to the front. This house will likely last centuries.
@jacobbaumgardner3406 I was believing but the not feeling an earthquake bit seems fishy. You can't just out-build the shifting of the earth with supports.
Hi Joe, Great video topic! I’m on the same wavelength. Our family just spent $12,800 upgrading our 1940s wooden bungalow with super efficient double paned widows just before our horrible year of heatwaves here in Texas. Our electric bill has actually gone down instead of up compared to a normal summer! The installers say they should pay for themselves in three or so years. In winter, the windows will also keep in heat during an occasional arctic blast. We draw the curtains during the hottest part of the day to help a bit more. Legend has it that in the 1800s early Texas German settlers built cellars with native limestone under their homes and would sit down there to get away from daytime heat. I’ve actually been in one in Castroville, Texas and it was easily 20 degrees cooler than outside temperatures. Add Animal burrow mimicry to your list. 😎🥇⭐️📺🎤
Dont have to bother with drawing the curtains during the day. Any heat that is absorbed by the curtains is now in the room anyways, curtains keep objects in the room from getting above ambient.
Underground houses with a central courtyard can be found in Tunisia. There are more than a few underground dwellings in Coober Pedy, Australia, where opal mining happens underground in a mostly desert environment
Windcatchers, yakhchals, and similar passive techniques are really cool and I wish they were more commonly used in modern architecture. Not only are the windcatchers functional, but they look cool too.
There's a kiosk coffee shop in my town that uses the windcatchers method. They did have to add spinners to keep the birds from nesting in the tower though.
I think it’s important to mention that if you’re going to seal up a house to prevent air infiltration, you need to make sure not to use materials containing VOC’s (Volatile Organic Compounds).
An ERV or HRV with dehumidifier MUST be used in any structure with low air-exchanges-per-hour. VOCs aren't a good reason to have an inefficient structure.
A Heat Recovery Air Exchanger or equivalent to provide oxygen to the residents and control humidity is required if you're going to have an airtight house, obviously. This really should not be surprising to anyone. There was a brief period in the 1970s, during the energy crisis, when people sealed up air leaks without taking this into account. But that was a half-century ago, and we should be past it by now.
I live in Finland, but we have both hot summers and cold winters. Good insulation helps in both cases. And during summer, shaders between (3 layer) windows so the heat from sun doesent heat inside air. Its allso possible to cool with waterpipes underground or drilled hole (temperature is quite constant at only 2m or over underground). During winter, our house warms with district heating (underground pipesystem running hot water in loop), and that water running underground heats with local industrys excess heat from prosess.
yeah some people seems to think insulation only work one way.. tripple layer windows with a partial reflective coating is great in summer. greenhouse heating form windows is not very good in winter so the coating isn't a big downside in winter.
Swede here. Wouldn’t say hot, more like warm summers since it rarely gets above 25C. What i have found useful is to have two fans on two windows, one “intake” and one “exhaust”, kind of like a pc case. The constant air flow pushes any hot air outside
@@mtb416 yes, Texas is (much) hotter than Finland. But that doesent mean that my writing isnt true. During hottest summertime 1-3 weeks we have 30c (86F) and a bit over, max temp around 36-37c (97F) in shade.
There’s no summer in Finland. :D Funny story: last summer, I stayed in Paris for a week, the temperature was around 40 degree C. The day I came back to Finland, the temperature in Finland increased to a record and there’s some concern in the news about the hot. The concern was temperature would raise up to 25 degree C, which is way too hot for a Finn. But yes, Finnish building is extremely good, excellent insulation and ventilation.
When we built our house 5 years ago, we ran with under ground pipes for incoming air. Its 5-10 degrees celsius warmer during winter and 2-8 degrees cooler during summer. Its inclined with perforated pipe just before the last bend, for water to escape.
That can be great and sounds like it works really well for your area. You do have to be able to clean these pipes in most climates due to mold and mildew issues. There is also radon concerns some places to think about too. But awesome idea. Could also just seal pipes and pump glycerin around and get same results in any area.
@@mrkozz1 The thought of mold was actually brought up, but our neighbour has the "same" system and for them it worked well. Not sure what it takes for mold to start growing since even if its probably quite humid, the air is constantly moving at quite high speeds.
If you're interested in passive housing, look up the "earthship homes" of Taos, NM. They're constructed in a way that not only is their heating and cooling passive, but also their water use comes from rainfall (in a desert mind you) and is super-efficient. They have resources available to help you design your own anywhere in the world.
Yeah. The whole video seems kinda half-assed, and the lack of even mentioning earthships is indicative of the slapdash nature of this particular video, which does not live up to the level of quality we’ve come to expect from the channel.
@larthallor earthships and passive house aren't really comparable. Passive house has had extensive research done on it and has been implemented much more. Earthships, although well meaning, have many problems and are not well thought out. They have no standards nor is modelling done to understand how it will perform. I discourage their use until they are properly researched and understood. Having worked on one and reading what little research there is I would avoid this style in most circumstances.
Earth ships, while wonderful, aren’t within code through most of the USA. NM is an exception that could cloud the function of showing ‘modern’ cooling solutions.
I recently bought an old balloon framed house and stumbled across some old timer knowledge talking to my grandfather. The balloon framing of the house allows air to circulate in the walls from the basement all the way to the attic. In the summer the hot air rises out of the roof and draws the cool air up from the basement. It’s crazy how fast we can forget why we do things when the new and fancy arrives
Those vertical channels become pathways allowing fire to spread quickly (in the event of a house fire.) And balloon framing requires long straight studs which are no longer available.
My great grandfather constructed a home in the 80's that he designed to be self heating, cooling and all energy was generated on site with solar panels. 3 generations lived there over the years and only used the AC a handful of times. He then built a smaller version of the same style as a retirement home.
I'm jealous in a sort of positive way. I have the know-how of constructing such a home but not the means by a long shot. Good that your family benefitted of those ideas.
A timely reminder that, in the context of making our lifestyles more sustainable (and making our homes and work places comfortable), there really are alternatives to "more, more, more" (electricity, air conditioning gadgets, and so forth). It was a great segment. Thanks.
Right up my alley with this. I’ve been interested in passive heating and cooling since I was in high school, so I read everything I could about it. However, trying to get anyone interested in passive hvac was crazy hard in the late 70’s early 80’s. So I did something else instead, photography. So long story short, starting in 2006 was finally able to build my dream cabin in the woods. This was in one of the coldest places in Colorado, Hartsel elevation 9650 ft. Using all the above mentioned passive heating strategies, with active solar in floor heat, super insulated- walls ceiling and floor. PV solar, and thermal solar panels. This off grid home produced its own heat, and electric. My backup heat was wood first, propane last. The electric was pV’s, and a wind turbine ( yes it blows A Lot in South Park. Just ask Cartmen;)
@@macklinillustration , thank you. Unfortunately I don’t live in it anymore. Had to sell the cabin in the woods because of divorce. However, I learned a lot in building, community, building codes, and relationships. It’s worth it to have the experience.
A foreign friend has a townhouse with an open center core made to carry heat up and out at the roof access door/window. It works well when 1) the temp is high, but humidity is low; 2) the lower widows / doors are wide open (a security weakness); 3) the mosquito screens are clean (which is a constant maintenance item); 4) the tall house is hard on old knees. But they do have very low utility bills compared to my US home.
When I lived in San Francisco, USA most of those old Edwardian and Victorian apartment buildings had 'light wells' that were built in the centers of the buildings. Just basically holes from the ground straight up to the open sky, usually about 5 feet across, with windows that looked straight across into the opposite windows of another room in your or someone else's apartment. It seems like such a strange concept. I was told they existed to get some light into those interior rooms, and also for ventilation. I wonder if something like that would work somewhat like your description. In San Francisco the weather is pretty stable year-round, it doesn't usually get too cold or too hot. But I wonder how something like that would work in places like the US southeast or southwest France (where I now live) where winters are mild but summers can be uncomfortably hot. And in SW France air conditioning exists, but it doesn't necessarily go without saying that your home would have it. In fact it seems most people I know don't. I wonder if something like this would be a natural solution.
It's not that we stopped being clever. Using electricity to cool ourselves is extremely clever, the issue is that we didn't really understand the consequences when we started, and have gotten used to that solution.
Most inventions don't think about consequences until it's too late. Almost every invention I can think of has unintended results, some good, others not so much.
@@amandaburnham.8817 it's true, but I think it's simply impossible to think of every outcome, we cant really treat every invention the way we treated james webb telescope where we think of every scenario ahead.
My house was built in Pittsburgh in the 1890s on a hill overlooking the river. There are crazy strong winds coming up the hillside so they built it with the front door facing the river and the back windows directly in line with the front door. So most of the time I only have to open the door and windows and I get a wonderfully cooling breeze going right through. The past few years have given us longer periods of 90+ degree days so it doesn't work as well as it used to but I can still get away with just two window a/c units that I only use on the worst days.
The same principle is used in the design of the Biltmore Estate, Asheville, North Carolina. Its construction was completed in 1892, if I am remembering correctly.
I've been lucky enough to build my own off grid semi-passive home over the last two years. My main area is a large chamber where two of the four walls are a 40cm thick, 5% cement-stabilised rammed earth wall. Overall the wall weighs over six tonnes. The soil for it was Manually dug and filtered from 10 meters away, and was then compacted (by hand!) Into formworks. The rest of the walls/roof are heavily double insulated woodframe with steel external cladding. Above that you've got lots of solar panels on the roof to take the brunt of the heat. 100% DIY while doing my best to adhere to local building regulations. The rammed earth right-angle wall essentially acts like a giant thermal battery. It's incredible how stable the temperature stays. In winter it remains warm, in summer it is as cool as a cave. I also have a small fireplace right in the corner of this rammed earth wall. Once lit in winter, the thermal battery absorbs LOTS of heat and the room can remain warm for days. It's incredible how unappreciated and maligned these types of construction are....if my project was official, it would have gotten off the ground due to the fact that rammed earth is not considered an 'approved building material' in Australia. Despite its incredible strength and durability of literally thousands of years.
You said PVs catch most of the heat from above, but PVs work better when they're cool. Do you have or have you considered some method of draining the heat from them (perhaps to heat air or water) as a way of utilizing that heat while keeping the PVs cooler?
There is a community in Coral Gables, FL built in the 1890's that uses passive cooling. When I visited the outside temperature was 98F while the inside was 75F. Clever design design allows cooled air from an oversized, house surrounding porch to be drawn up through a centrally located staircase/chimney. I live in a steel building in the Nevada desert and I am modifying my home to use some of these (and other) principals. I call it "Solar Air Conditioning". I don't expect it to zero my electric bills, but expect it will be reduced.
Hi Joe, Thanks for the video! Would be cool if you could cover some of the construction techniques in more detail? Maybe those ancient air towers, etc.
Joe - at 3:39 "American Indians lived in caves . . ." Some time back I read about a California home builder who got a patent for building homes with flexible, earthquake tolerant joints holding concrete slab walls together, slab walls that had embedded wiring and plumbing. These homes had insulation on the outside which in turn was covered with stucco, and stucco itself can act as an insulator. Amazingly enough, living in those homes was like living in a cave, underground - cool in the summer, warm in the winter. Another group has developed "earthship homes" which are also like living in caves.
ERCOT = Egregiously Run Council of Texas On a more serious note, after you watch this video watch the technology connections videos about minisplits/heatpumps.
I live in the southern region of Brazil, and around here it only became common to have air conditioning in houses and apartments a couple of years ago (you could get air conditioning, but most people didn't bother because it rarely got too hot). Before that there was some electric heating for the winter, but mostly people would basically just dress acording to the weather
I saw a blog once with a dude who was kind of homesteading in the high desert around Northern Arizona iirc. He had a mobile home and he installed vents in the skirting and the floor. At night when it got cold he'd open the windows and the skirt vents to let the cold air in, then shut everything in the morning. When his place started warming up he'd open the floor vents and it would cool off the mobile home. I think he was using a few fans, but that's still better than an AC unit.
I'd be really curious to see an energy audit of 'a vernacular farmhouse' at a living history museum- they were also built to use passive thermal effects. I'm in an old farmhouse with 2-foot thick stone walls, and it CAN be very efficient and comfortable thanks to thermal inertia. First, are constructed to align with the sun so the front faces south, with a front porch that shades the front in summer but allows low winter sun to warm the house in winter. Don't forget the classic white-drapes for farmhouses to reflect light BUT allow a breeze through (in the times before screens & screen doors). The rear porch stays shady and cool. The 'chimney effect' helps to pull cool air in from the shady side of the house and circulate it through each floor and out the attic windows. Don't forget to open the windows at night and let cool air in to chill down the stone walls to stay comfortable.
Yeah, the problem with that is that these principles are not appicable to large scale housing for the population we currently have. And that's a problem with a lot of ancient solutions... They work really well, but not on the scale we need, so we need to learn the physical principles behind why these designs work and then figure out how to design larger structures to work with those principles.
Joe, I used your sponsor link yesterday to buy a new shaver from Henson Shaving. It hasn’t arrived yet but I did that on purpose because I needed a new shaver and I wanted to support one of my favourite TH-cam channels. I specifically went searching for a link I could use that you supplied and used your discount code. Cheers for the great videos over the years and I hope you still have the energy to continue doing what your doing.
THank you, Joe! I would love another video showing what homeowners can actually do on a small scale, on their own houses, to make them more passively energy efficient. Keep up the great educational work!
Hi--if you can find a high quality white paint made for roof painting--do it! I climbed up and painted my roof as my own mother's day present to myself. I read the reviews on paints and paid a bit more for the good stuff. The paint doesn't chip or peel, looks nicer, and lowered our home summer temps by about 6 degrees on average--doesn't sound like much, but it was just enough to not need as much air conditioning on most days. Already paid for the cost of the paint in one summer--especially since the cost of electricity has gone way up.
I was a custodian on the University of Idaho campus. I got to see progress shut down a perfectly good cooling system. The Administration Building had a cool basement that connected to the main stairs that went straight up the center of the building. The building its self was made from stone and brick that moderated the temperature. All the offices had outside and hallway windows that could be opened so the cold basement air would be pulled up the main stairs as the rooms warmed up on hot days. Building codes changed, so even the stone and brick administration building has to have fire doors to block the old natural airflow. This made our basement custodial office too cold as the cold couldn't escape up the stairs anymore. Now the building was room air conditioners sticking out of most of the outside windows.
Everyone, report this as spam; this person is not Joe; do not fall for this scam. Note the lack of a checkmark by the circular picture. Report as spam any such spoofs you come across on any webpage.
Techniques not forgotten, but definitely being underused. A lot of farm houses in Sask older than the 40's (most of them) are self cooling via good design. The qulliq of the Inuit is CRAZY POWERFUL! the amount of heat that gets thrown off the tiny flames is almost unbearable. It's so hot! And the blubber you eat also gets your body heat up.
I lived in Ireland for 7 years. The whole time we were there it never broke 25C. They're not that concerned about cooling. As far as hearing the older houses are small with a central fireplace. They're more concerned about staying dry so they adopted the double wall system like the British. They only recently introduced standards for insulation so the older houses are freezing in the winter if you don't have a fire.
Everyone speaks about thick adobe walls, big porches, planting trees around the house, opening windows during the night, etc., as if it were something new. This is like reinventing the wheel. I live in a house like this, that was built around 1940 (it's even younger than the house built by my grand-grandfather, where I was raised), and still running. I have in the bedroom 25-26 °C while there is almost 40 °C outside in summertime.
I live in a passive house in central California and my family and I love it. No AC or heater use. Yes, it was more expensive up front, but our electric bill never goes over $30 and we do not have solar cells. It is wonderful to be in a cool 70 degree home when it is 109 degrees outside.
I had a house with radiant heat in the ceiling upstairs, and in the floor downstairs. It was extremely comfortable, but when those tubes start to weaken and leak, you're back to "traditional" heating, since repair cost is astronomical. Then, another house on a lot that was previously eco friendly. The lot is FILLED with underground plastic "stuff" and the surface would be too, it it were not covered with vegetation. At this point, I say stick with traditional, proven construction, that will last, and not pollute with new tech.
Simple thick walls will work in most climates for both heating and cooling. 12-18" thick walls (concrete block with 2" thick insulation on both sides would work fine). THe problem is the window and door openings and where the roof attaches. Another option is to have the structure underground. The grounds insulative properties would work well for both cooling and heating. People think they have to always go high tech, but the pueblo indians built adobe buildings that worked great both for very hot summers and medium cold winters.
Canada has had the so-called "R2000" program which started circa 1982, or forty years ago. My house is built to follow (more or less) this standard, with 24 sq meters of solar gain, foot-thick walls, air tight, a Heat Recovery Air Exchanger. Our heat, even in Canada, is quite affordable. That said, all the gadgets and gaming PCs do use a lot of power.
My 1914 Craftsman house has a "California cooler" where a vent on the floor and on the ceiling in the kitchen cabinet circulated cooler air from the foundation crawl space to the warmer attic.
One thing to mention is double-hung windows. They are meant to be able to be opened at the top to vent warmer air while the bottom is opened to let cooler air in. Combined with higher ceilings, they help keep things more comfortable. Also, in dryer regions of the world, one way to cool things down is the swamp cooler. They mostly work on the principle of evaporation, in that when water evaporates it draws energy from the air to bring about the evaporation. They use 15% to 35% of the energy of an electric AC. They tend to not work as well in areas of higher humidity. Lastly, most of the techniques for keeping the cost of heating and cooling down that Joe mentioned all involve reducing waste through conservation. A well insulated building will retain heat in the winter and stay cooler in the summer. Using the right kind of lighting helps. We have many more options today for conserving electricity. Overall, many of our modern appliances are more efficient today. Updating to newer appliances can save a lot.
Joe if you think the Eastgate Centre is cool, Mick Pearce afterwards designed the CH2 in Melbourne, Austrlalia, and it's mindblowing; on top of using the principles from Eastgate it also has automatically moving sunshades, a passive water circulation system for air cooling, all kinds of curved ceilings and surfaces to channel airflow... I don't remember the exact numbers but its water and energy consumption were something like 15% and 25% of other average buildings, or something. Plus its air quality is phenomenal as it filters all its air from outside instead of recycling air internally. On top of that Melbourne's weather is infamously erratic, able to reach water-freezing temperatures in winter nights and up to 45ºC (113ºF) over summer days.
I lived in a heritage home built in the early 1900s and it was surprisingly cool in 104 f (40 c) temps. The walls were thick and there was a lovely porch in the shade. No air-conditioning but very comfortable.
As somebody who managed to get the job title "Building physics consultant" - I think you got most of this stuff right. NABERS is an upcoming standard from Australia with (IMO) even more promise than Passivhaus or Passive House Btw I'm on Nebula but would rather watch videos on youtube. Nebula doesn't have a great UI and keeps signing me out of the mobile app
This has always been very fascinating to me. How to use architecture and good techniques to keep a building cool. I went to a mosque in my country, an old mosque made of stone. It was so damn nice and cool inside during summer at noon! Since then I have been very interested in this.
8:58 Tbh... neither 28ºC or 14ºC is a comfortable temperature. That being said, i wish all buildings thought more about that, with the global warming and energetic crysis, because of conflicts and what not, we need a paradigm shift in housing, really fast. In my country we still love to build ginormous buildings with huge windows and mirror like covers, needless to say, as an engineer it creaps me out. Keep up with the good work Joe, your channel is awesome.
Those temperatures are not comfortable because that is not what you are used to. It would probably be comfortable if you weren’t used to a constant 22°C.
For indoors? Here, we aim to have temperatures between 18 and 23ºC, the ideal being 21 - 22 °C. But yes, overall comfortable temperatures is a subjective matter aldo dependant on the humidity and all that. Personally, i would die if i had 28ºC inside my office/house.
This winter, I tried lowering the temps, but at 17 and with Home office - I felt miserable - my nose and feet were cold. Sleeping and doing some house chores was fine tho
I'm an HVAC tech. There is one major problem that no one talks about when 100% outside air is supplied to a building. It's filtration. Air filters plug up quickly when nothing but outside air passes through them. Filters typically need to be replaced monthly in a system like this. I see this in hospitals and laboratories. Filters are usually disposable and not biodegradable. Washable filters exist but they aren't very efficient. If everyone were to switch over to a system like this it might create a new crisis.
Or 3.... They burned stuff for heating the house and cooking. Cooking also double as a heating form. Also.... Keep your farm animals in the ground floor and live on the second and you will feel much more warm in the winter.
8:50 slight mistake joe. You said larger surface area absorbs less heat. This is incorrect. Large surface area will absorb more heat. As shown in the graphic the building has small windows to absorb less heat.
Yeah, I think he might have meant that it's a larger surface area which gives off more heat, and since it's "crumpled up", there's a smaller chance that all of it faces a potential heat source at once than it if were flat.
@@rossgirven5163 the context is important, because in that particular building, the larger surface area gives off more heat, as Rasmus mentioned. I think your comment was the brain fart!
@@squirlmy I think your comment was a brain fart. Joe specifically said that the larger surface area absorbs less heat. Context has nothing to do with it.
I love the concept of passive houses. I was going to build one but the wait list was roughly 3-4 years in my area with some local builders that support the standards of passive home building.
I want to build one as well but the few builders I know that do it only take jobs that are 1M+... yeah I need a house that's costs 350k tops. Looks like we need to raise awareness so more builders start making normal people houses to passive house standards.
I'm convinced that the big investors and analysts are trying to scare us to keep us poor and ignorant to the market.. because its steady doing good after all the jobless and market crash talks
Love, love, love!!! This video!!! Thank you so much! This IS what I need to break free from my $500+ electric bills every month ( this has literally been going on for about 4 years! My Daddy has a house that could fit about 12 of mine inside of it and he has had an electric bill of $60-$64 a month forever right up until recently when it jumped up to $100 bucks a month and now he's considering going solar. I however am stuck in Southern Illinois with an Electric Co-op that is just bending me over every month, and they never bring the Vaseline when they come with the bill!)
When I was growing up in Florida in the 1970s it was still common for homes to have jalousie windows. They're less common today because they're poorly insulated, but we didn't have AC and never had a problem because the home was a natural breezeway.
@@shayanthis the one they did for us was a 360 foot well to access the ground water for a stable temperature and trenched it in to the same place our old outside unit was. Now there's no more big noisy outside piece. 😊
Here in Dominican I've found that with all sun we get, covering the roof with solar panels provides enough shade to it to keep it fresh enough that it needs minimal air conditioning. Here just fans won't work due to the high humidity and you'd end up swamped real quick.
I’m always working on passive cooling and electricity saving projects. Some of the most simple and effective concepts are being overlooked. The power companies don’t like that my bill is negative dollars and added a $30 fee.
You page has no videos; feel free to upload to share your insights and discoveries! My electric bill isn't quite as low because I sleep in a hammock but am open to ideas for wintering
We need to go back to having more porches. That ,and the roof overhangs, did so much to keep the skin of a building out of the sun. In our old circa 1886 house we had a very old furnace. It made the house feel far warmer in the winter then the 90% efficient furnace we replaced it with did and it was so simply built that in the summer, we could go down to the basement and just turn on the fan portion manually and blow the cool basement air upstairs. Sometimes, we shoot ourselves in the foot when we get too fancy.
Joe, thanks for the distinction between PHI and PHIUS standards. How about a video on how a community, say a city block, with it's own microgrid (DC) populated with passive homes, all with PV and storage, could be the core component in the design of the future electrical grid .
On igloos: it's not just that snow retains heat better than ice does; it's also much, much harder to cut and shape ice than snow. You can see from the video clip you showed that the snow blocks an igloo is being built from are quite easy to shape with a trowel (or something like that). Nothing like that would be possible with ice.
My house has a cement slab set about 18 inches below ground and the lower level of the house can be 30 degrees less than the outside air. Even with no heating or cooling it stays between 50-80 degrees when the outside can be 15-106. I have been using resistive heaters in the bedrooms and a wood stove in the main room which I will replace with a mini split sometime this year. My upstairs level is pretty much whatever temperature the outside is, so when it's warm I open the windows. Most of the roof is shaded by trees, but I may still add an attic fan to blow hot air out of the attic before it can radiate down into the house. When I was a kid in West Texas we didn't have AC, but we did have a swamp cooler on the roof that cools the air by evaporation. It trickles water across a porous surface and then blows air through it which can cool the air 25-30 degrees if the humidity is low enough. It probably wouldn't work in the east when the humidity is high though. Where I live the electricity really never goes off unless there is a windstorm in the winter that knocks down trees, which is why I have a wood stove, but I added a storage battery to plug the refrigerator and a few other things if there was an issue
I live in vietnam, and our apartment stays relatively cool due to strong breezes. I suppose i could sleep at night with the windows open but noise and pollution make it nearly impossible.
I actually build passive homes! I work for a company called Phoenix Haus in Colorado. We're combining green passive housing with offsite construction. The science of it all is above my pay grade but I'm actually on the ground building houses in a state of the art shop. Basically the house is broken down into dozens of "panels" built offsite and then shipped and assembled on site in a matter of weeks or even days. Each wall is over a foot thick and roofs can be over 2'. Everything is over engineered to hell and insulated to an extreme. It's cool being a part of an up and coming company and feeling like I'm on the cutting edge of technology when it comes to construction. Couldn't help but share
There are a set of standards called Enerphit from the passivhaus institute that give guidance to make retrofits as close to passive as possible. Might be of interest.
Also there is a program called Energisprong that is doing this in EU and now in NYC. They take 3D laser images of a building and build perfect exterior covers that are airtight, add insulation values and contain the triple panels windows. They “snap” into place perfectly and can the work can be done in just a few days without anyone having to move out of their homes. We can be clever!!
Love your channel. I just installed a hybrid heat pump water heater last weekend simple reasonably cheap way to use less electricity that saves money over the long run
When it became possible for me to own a home, I had been renting near my employment close to the seacoast in Southern California. I went to lengths to find an affordable way to live in this same area because I realized the temperature modulating effects of the Pacific Ocean's proximity. So had the Spanish before this area became part of the U.S. Thick Adobe earth filled walls, kept the night coolness throughout most of the day, in summer and stayed near those earth temperatures warmed by the winter sun. Shaded cloisters and the open passageways to the mild ocean breezes aided comfort. While the place I bought didn't have those attributes I did not use the window AC I bought at the same time for nearly 30 years because of the thicker plaster walls holding more night coolness under the wide eaves it has. I use selective shading to help keep my heating bill down and a deciduous tree shades the front in summer, but drops its leaves in winter, providing more sun heating or less appropriate to the season. But it is the "shortest thermometer in the nation" we have here, according to the Chamber of Commerce ads from decades ago that gives my modest home its lower comfort energy costs.
My office is too hot in the winter and too cold in the summer. When the office is so cold in the summer you have to wear two sweaters and run a heater. My apartment is comfortable in the summer and drafty in the winter. We also have storms knock over trees and had no power for 24 hours, only days later get hit by record breaking heat which overloaded the grid and lost power again. I love the idea of alternative housing. Castles in Ireland made of stone are cold all year round.
For appliance power users like me, I'm curious as how these passive structures would handle heat generating tech like server farms, or even a small scale room to handle a modern gaming rig which can often consistently output 100-300W with the monitor and tower.
I live in an old stone house, it keep cool in summer, but is hard to heat in the winter. The only way it gets warm is if the multifuel stoves are used - then the walls hold the heat for a while (but the kind of heat generated by an oil filled radiator does nothing at all to heat up the walls).
The FED has lost it and the sad fact is it's pretty obvious we are headed for hyperinflation.i think stores better have tight security because when people can't afford to feed their families, things might get ugly
Just to put some perspective on costs: my electricity bill is currently around $2000/y. I use basically no electricity, though we've used a bit more this Winter because we're both working from home and my other half doesn't like my option of using lots of blankets to stay warm. If we were to spend $10,000 to replace the thin single-glazed windows in our place with double-glazed windows, that would cut maybe $500 off our electricity bill. The simplistic payback period for that project would be around 20 years. If we were to spend $2000 replacing our off-peak resistive electric hot water with off-peak heat pump hot water, that would reduce our electricity bill by about $500/y, giving an effective payback period of around four years. We keep our energy use low by only having one or two lights on, mostly reading or watching movies for entertainment, and most importantly dressing warmer or cooler for the prevailing conditions rather than cranking up the heat pump. During summer we'll cool down to 23C, during winter we'll heat to 16C (and wear warm clothes or live under blankets). $50 for a "blanket hoodie" is far cheaper than $100/year for heating. Passive Housing is a great idea, but for established homes there are many options to reducing energy consumption which basically boil down to dressing appropriately for the prevailing conditions rather than using energy to make the house comfortable for suit-wearers.
Great job! Many folks aren’t willing to pay attention and make the same decisions you make everyday though. Where do you live BTW. Some climates just get less comfortable too. Well done though!
@@mrkozz1 I live in Canberra, which is an inland city that tends to be cool and dry, max summer around 35C, min winter around -5C, I'm told average humidity over the year is 67% if that means anything. Also typical Australian construction is brick veneer homes (brick exterior walls, plasterboard interior) and architects/builders here are clueless about airflow, airtightness, or applying insulation correctly. I doubt any house built in Australia would pass occupancy inspection in Canada for example.
@@Krazie-Ivan bro, those are science fiction buildings ... build a normal home, for normal people in the desert using only thermal dynamics, as you say.
Oh you should check the old traditional Houses in South Syria (ancient techniques) that literally work! My grandparents house used to feel like always air-conditioned
We should have always done this. Just another intelligent design cast aside to disposable housing that constantly needs excessive repairs, because that keeps a constant supply of work for construction. Wouldn't want everyone to be able to live freely without working non-stop like a proper society. Capitalism will never let us rest. Ever.
My wife and I lived on our sailboat in the tropics / Caribbean for over ten years. We had no air conditioning. We had a large shade over most of the boat when in port or at anchor. Left all hatches and ports open as insects were for the most part not an issue. We usually had a good sea breeze and were rarely uncomfortable. Also, quite frankly, you do get use to it. When I was a child, I was raised in Ft Lauderdale Fl. This was even hotter than the Caribbean. We did not have air conditioning. The house was built with good flow through ventilation lots of windows. Again, we were use to it.
modern passive houses are are a nightmare for firefighter too, because its airtight and you can't really open the doors without then getting a backdraft (fresh air rushes into a still active fire) - so its hard to really save those houses then. At least that is what i got told by a coworker who is a voluntary firefighter (which is pretty common at least here in Germany)
But ICF houses don't burn easily. You can hit them with a flamethrower and they won't burn. The occupants have plenty of time to exit before their furniture catches ablaze.
THank you JOe for this! I am an architect, and I've been designing energy efficient houses for over a decaede. Nothing fancy, by the way, just smart design. I live in a place similar to NW Texas (in terms of climate) and my own house only needs AC for about 10 days in the summer.
My drafty house saved me from a bad carbon monoxide problem with a bad gas furnace. I would never live in a cooler-like air-tight house and have any gas appliance.
Radon is easily addressed with a proper foundation layer & drainage system... which should already be present to prevent ground water wicking up into a slab, or pooling humidity under a floating floor system. If a building has gas (which imo is a bad choice already), it should also have carbon monoxide alarms. Poor reason to have inefficient structures.
Hey! I'm from the green fields and cloudy skies of Ireland! The houses that are built here are well insulated. They trap heat from the sun during the day and then release that heat overnight, through the walls and ceilings. So that you can stay warm and sleep well. Because ya know heat rises. Same reason why traditionally every home has a fireplace because heat will rise through the floorboards to bedroom. However, times have changed and now the fireplaces are being replaced by central heating system. Alright Goodluck! 🇮🇪 😀 😊
I lived in Sicily, Italy for a few years as a kid, and it got hot in the summer. Really hot. But I don't remember it being stuffy in the house, like it is in Wisconsin. Our building (and all the other buildings I know of) did not have A/C. It just wasn't a thing that was installed. Heaters were, but not A/C, and we managed. The cool tile floor helped, along with the cement walls. Also, people stopped working during the hottest parts of the day & went home.
This whole thing is really cool but I will say at 8:59, 28 C is extremely hot for inside a building still. They definitely would still need some sort of air conditioning.
In fairness, Harare Zimbabwe's temperature range is only between 84 °F (the average high in October) and 45 °F (the average low in July). A tarp could nearly provide the same "cooling" as described. If I lived there, I don't think I'd spend any money on air conditioning.
I did that - instead of putting some piping down for a heat pump, I put the whole house down in the ground. The ground moderates the temperature so it cannot freeze, and you don't need air cooling. It is 10 x 30 and made of steel and is nice and quiet.
Ants and termites have been doing it for millions of years. There is in Spain a terracota container called "botijo" which keeps water cool for long hours. Earth ships use a similar principle to stay cool and off-the-grid
I’m originally from East TN and now live in lush, humid coastal Ecuador and I don’t have ac. Most of the homes here don’t. Where I live is very open compared to similarly-sized houses in the US and there’s a tile floor. The more traditional houses here are built with cane and bamboo and wood, and I find them to be comfortable, again very openly built. And I was always someone who loved air conditioning, I’ve just sorta acclimated. Take 2 cold showers a day (no hot water, not really needed)
The gravity driven electric generation sounds like something that would have ben used before electrically. Like cooling your shack in death valley. It was at least 50 degrees cooler just because the miners built a carport About 10 feet higher over their shack...giving shade And cooling the house.
Also as someone who lived outside for over a decade, you just get used to a broader range of temperatures. Also, when it gets too hot to do things you stop doing things. Modern life doesn't like the idea of needing to relax and conserve energy but that's what you have to do when it's hot. It's not just a matter of finding ways to make being comfortable more eco friendly, it's an entire mentality shift that needs to happen within our culture.
Lol literally never gonna happen, we can't even shift consumer demand in the face of climate change
Yup, as a bicycle commuter in an office/city that is not super bicycle friendly I am one of 2 to 3 people who get here via bike. Everybody complains about the heat in the walk from the car to the building I'm FL summer. If you actually spend time outside your body adjusts to it, I get to work after 11.6 miles of riding my bike barely breaking a sweat (80ish in the morning, in the 100 degree ride home Def am sweating)
Nothing to add, I just agree. :)
@@g00fysmiley nah you just stink and your coworkers are too nice to tell you
@@g00fysmiley as a bicycle commuter in Texas I can relate. Although when it's 90 in the morning I do get a little perspiration. In the winter everyone is freezing but it's only in the lower 60s or upper 50s and I think it's fine because when you get moving your muscles warm you up
Another very interesting thing that makes houses more efficient when it comes to heating and cooling is being surrounded by deciduous trees. Some people in Greece have started doing that, and it's actually a super interesting solution. During the winter, they shed their leaves, exposing the house to the sun as much as possible. Then, during the spring they green again and provide natural shade throughout the summer. Not only do they benefit cooling and heating, but their shade is more pleasant to sit under than artificial structures, along with having other benefits of having trees in your garden.
Lovely, until the roots crack the foundations
@@jakesalvadori6852 Well, I'm no architect/civil engineer, so I can't comment on that. But if the issues with planting those trees are surmountable, I can't see why you wouldn't want them.
@@jakesalvadori6852 Its greece. Earthquakes will crack that foundation just as much as those tree roots.
Can be a great solution but takes time to grow the trees to a useful size for this. Also you have to find the right type of tree. Not all trees grow and drop leaves at the same time of year and can be affected by weird climate changes too. Still trees are Awesome!!
If you want to read a bit more about this in the context of the US, "Compound Climate and Infrastructure Events: How Electrical Grid Failure Alters Heat Wave Risk" by B.Stone and E.Mallen is a good starting point. It is only 8 pages and compares 2 strategies across 3 cities.
The relevant bit is that which high-albedo (reflectivity) roofing helps older, single story, single family homes a lot more than canopy coverage, canopy coverage offers a lot of other benefits as well. Better air quality, improvements to mental health and opinion of residents of their own neighborhood, etc. But to quote the paper, "Other recent work has found each one percent increase in urban tree canopy to be associated with a reduction in temperatures of 0.14 and 0.2 degrees Celsius in arid and humid climates, respectively." 0.14 and 0.2 might seem like very little, but a 5-7% increase in canopy coverage reducing temps by an average of 1 degree Celsius is huge.
Anyway, it's a short, if technical read. Highly recommend checking it out.
Having grown up in the South it's interesting that there definitely was a housing type that was common in the South. HIgh 9-10ft ceilings, a central hallway with doors on either end that you could open to allow pass through breezes. Transoms over each hallway door to allow ventilation. Big windows along the sides of the houses that allowed cross-ventilation. Even the use of extensive porches, sometimes completely around the house so that walls and windows were shaded. Then there was also the sleeping porch, which was a large screened in porch that was open on two or three sides, so during the heat of the summer, the family could move their beds out to the sleeping porches where it was cooler with more of a breeze.
Some of those features have continued into the modern era, most people don't understand why they were there but continue using the design elements but they lose practical purposes by not being incorporated into the design correctly. I live in a 100 year old house in south Georgia and for the most part you just described it lol. This house is built in one of the oldest sections of town and used to have a guest house (now a separate residence) and on dirt roads. It amazing how much has changed
The original Asian Indian ..bungalow with verandas and wooden blinds on the windows and long overhanging eves was a solution adopted across the British empire ..
Passive cooling and thermal control have been used for millennia.. we were dumb and forgot to adapt our fashion homes... now its time to re learn .
Must be a good neighborhood. No thieves muggers or people with shanks shanking people in their sleep on their sleeping porches. Must be nice to live away from the cities.
What? No... just no.
Most of the architecture on built-in-place homes in the south (and elsewhere) today is a melange of elements common to houses built all over the US. This is a practical consideration based on what material suppliers can provided in terms of roofing, siding, and millwork. Many design elements that are hallmarks of southern homes simply aren't available unless you have a custom home built. Even then, many structural features are disallowed by modern building codes due either to fire safety, hurricane building codes, or energy building codes.
The Modern Era ended 70 years ago. Your house was actually built towards the end of the Late Modern era. We absolutely do not build houses like that any more.
Many different house styles for managing temperature. My favourite is the Riad style in Morocco.
My house has thick adobe walls, high ceilings, domed roofs, double windows (small ones, up high in the main rooms) and rooftops painted bright white. It’s always 10 to 12 degrees cooler than outside. I have to close up in the morning and open in the cool of the evening. There’s no air conditioning except for ceiling fans, which are rarely used. I designed it using common sense and observing what worked for other people here. I like my house very much. I’m on the Mexican high desert plateau.
My parents moved in their new low energy passive house in 1998. It does not have air condition. It only has 9 kW heating, which is turned on for 2x2 hours each day to provide warm water. And it is cool in the summer and warm in the winter. It mainly gets heated by a large south-facing window, which can be shaded easily in the summer. Its sun shade made from sailcloth. No fancy electric jalousies or similar stuff. Just 40'x20' of fabric, two wooden poles and some elastic bands to span it over the terrace. It was $200 of initial investment and zero operational cost.
Pictures or video? Especially if it's here on YT
@@MrDudebud1 It's on the front page of the enginering company which managed the construction site at the time, Gildebau. I don't know how URLs in comments are handled here, so I would ask you to search for the company online. There is no YT video though. The house was finished seven years before YT's foundation after all.
@SiqueScarface YT does allow you to post links in chats. And can you please, since when I type in gildebau engineering/homes/etc. into Google, I can't find it. You may have filters in place so it isn't working for me
In Australia we have a town called Coober Pedy. The temperatures regularly get over 50C (122F). The whole town is built underground in what started out as abandoned opal mines. If you wanted a new room you just carefully dug one out. Heating and cooling are generally not required and the only electricity needed is for appliances. This is mostly obtained from solar or wind generation these days but was once from diesel generators.
Wow. Town of the future.
Inspiration for future Mars habitat
please discuss radon issues.
@@rm-gh1co Only certain areas have radon in excess.
@@rm-gh1co They (and most of the world) are fine - the soil and rock doesn't contain the mineral that breaks down to release radon.
It's something to check for when buying or building since in radon prone areas, you can "solve" the problem by ventilating the basement (Modern air-tight houses concentrate the radon to dangerous levels)
Having that off-the-grid, self-sustaining smart home is such a cool concept. Everything from smart architectural design to aquaponic gardens and solar roofs. I could watch hours of content that covers that.
Kirsten Dirksen 👍
It is also something that fewer and fewer people can afford. Buildings like the "Eastgate Center" ref: 8:08 are a better alternative, but like projects have been fare from cheap buildings.
You will need to replace the batteries every 5 years so there will be batteries to recycle. Oh and where do you get the material for the batteries and the solar panels? Hmmm maybe mining oh wait we can't mine creates CO2.
Yes. Existing requires energy. Building requires materials. Everyone is aware.
The impossibility of perfection is not a reason to avoid doing better.
@@b.6603 Well said 👏
There's a kindergarden down the street here (a few kilometers north of downtown Oslo) where they built it as an "active house". Even though this is pretty far north compared to where you are, this house produces more energy over a year than it spends, which is sent back to the grid. Pretty neat ;)
My grandpa built their house with a passive cooling idea. It sits on a very large concrete pad (like could hold up a 10 story building big) and had the entire front of the house be a massive 2 story sunspace that draws in air. Essentially it can be 90 outside and feel like a nice 72 indoors. Same goes for winter which is common in the PNW. No AC at all in the building, just a couple electric heaters under window sills.
I’m trying to visualize this. Was this his unique design or is it something regional maybe? If you have more info I’d love to learn more about it.
@@flatsixx it’s hard to explain. AFIAK he made the house himself, the only part he didn’t make was the foundation, which weren’t originally to his specifications so he was ready to take the company to court if they didn’t redo it. It’s funny because the concrete foundation my dad said it strong enough to hold a 5 story building, and when a 4.7 earthquake went off years ago my grandma didn’t feel a thing. Every single wall and even the floor is cross beamed and the amount of beams was double and the thickness of the beams was near double so when you walk even on the second story if doesn’t feel like you’re walking in a wood house, it feels like steel and concrete, it’s that solid. My dad helped my grandpa build it in the 80s when wood was cheap, he even put massive inch thick trim on the doors so it’s basically impossible to tear out door hinges without removing everything, I had to drill out a lock once because of that, there was no way to fiddle with the bolt.
As for the ventilation design, I’m still a little confused by it, but I just know that when it’s hot out the sunspace which is basically the entire front of the house (with a rafter floor on the 2nd floor to walk around on) the sunspace heats up and the rest of the house will stay cool, and when it cools down I open up the windows on the side and rear of the house and the doors to the sunspace (the bedrooms on the 2nd floor sit behind the sunspace with doors for access) and there’s a flow of air that moves from the back of the house to the front.
This house will likely last centuries.
@@jacobbaumgardner3406 What direction does the front of the house face?
@@mxpants4884 south
@jacobbaumgardner3406 I was believing but the not feeling an earthquake bit seems fishy. You can't just out-build the shifting of the earth with supports.
Hi Joe, Great video topic! I’m on the same wavelength. Our family just spent $12,800 upgrading our 1940s wooden bungalow with super efficient double paned widows just before our horrible year of heatwaves here in Texas. Our electric bill has actually gone down instead of up compared to a normal summer! The installers say they should pay for themselves in three or so years. In winter, the windows will also keep in heat during an occasional arctic blast. We draw the curtains during the hottest part of the day to help a bit more. Legend has it that in the 1800s early Texas German settlers built cellars with native limestone under their homes and would sit down there to get away from daytime heat. I’ve actually been in one in Castroville, Texas and it was easily 20 degrees cooler than outside temperatures. Add Animal burrow mimicry to your list. 😎🥇⭐️📺🎤
Dont have to bother with drawing the curtains during the day. Any heat that is absorbed by the curtains is now in the room anyways, curtains keep objects in the room from getting above ambient.
@@instanoodles If your curtains are white, you'll reflect atleast some of the radiation back, reducing the energy concentration i.e. the heat.
Underground houses with a central courtyard can be found in Tunisia. There are more than a few underground dwellings in Coober Pedy, Australia, where opal mining happens underground in a mostly desert environment
@@instanoodles just put the “curtain” on the outside though and it works great. We have these on our place and it really keeps the heat out.
Very nice!
Windcatchers, yakhchals, and similar passive techniques are really cool and I wish they were more commonly used in modern architecture. Not only are the windcatchers functional, but they look cool too.
There's a kiosk coffee shop in my town that uses the windcatchers method. They did have to add spinners to keep the birds from nesting in the tower though.
I think it’s important to mention that if you’re going to seal up a house to prevent air infiltration, you need to make sure not to use materials containing VOC’s (Volatile Organic Compounds).
And control for humidity way better.
Yeah, I hear "sealed building" and I think "sick building syndrome."
An ERV or HRV with dehumidifier MUST be used in any structure with low air-exchanges-per-hour. VOCs aren't a good reason to have an inefficient structure.
A Heat Recovery Air Exchanger or equivalent to provide oxygen to the residents and control humidity is required if you're going to have an airtight house, obviously.
This really should not be surprising to anyone.
There was a brief period in the 1970s, during the energy crisis, when people sealed up air leaks without taking this into account. But that was a half-century ago, and we should be past it by now.
We'll be showing the IAQ sensor in the wall switch product at TecHomeBuilder in October. LC enables PH.
I live in Finland, but we have both hot summers and cold winters. Good insulation helps in both cases. And during summer, shaders between (3 layer) windows so the heat from sun doesent heat inside air. Its allso possible to cool with waterpipes underground or drilled hole (temperature is quite constant at only 2m or over underground).
During winter, our house warms with district heating (underground pipesystem running hot water in loop), and that water running underground heats with local industrys excess heat from prosess.
yeah some people seems to think insulation only work one way.. tripple layer windows with a partial reflective coating is great in summer. greenhouse heating form windows is not very good in winter so the coating isn't a big downside in winter.
Swede here. Wouldn’t say hot, more like warm summers since it rarely gets above 25C. What i have found useful is to have two fans on two windows, one “intake” and one “exhaust”, kind of like a pc case. The constant air flow pushes any hot air outside
Yeah, it’s doesn’t get Texas hot in Finland. You’re off by 10-20 degrees F. But what would I know, I’m just a stupid American…
@@mtb416 yes, Texas is (much) hotter than Finland. But that doesent mean that my writing isnt true. During hottest summertime 1-3 weeks we have 30c (86F) and a bit over, max temp around 36-37c (97F) in shade.
There’s no summer in Finland. :D Funny story: last summer, I stayed in Paris for a week, the temperature was around 40 degree C. The day I came back to Finland, the temperature in Finland increased to a record and there’s some concern in the news about the hot. The concern was temperature would raise up to 25 degree C, which is way too hot for a Finn. But yes, Finnish building is extremely good, excellent insulation and ventilation.
When we built our house 5 years ago, we ran with under ground pipes for incoming air. Its 5-10 degrees celsius warmer during winter and 2-8 degrees cooler during summer. Its inclined with perforated pipe just before the last bend, for water to escape.
That can be great and sounds like it works really well for your area. You do have to be able to clean these pipes in most climates due to mold and mildew issues. There is also radon concerns some places to think about too. But awesome idea.
Could also just seal pipes and pump glycerin around and get same results in any area.
@@mrkozz1 The thought of mold was actually brought up, but our neighbour has the "same" system and for them it worked well. Not sure what it takes for mold to start growing since even if its probably quite humid, the air is constantly moving at quite high speeds.
If you're interested in passive housing, look up the "earthship homes" of Taos, NM. They're constructed in a way that not only is their heating and cooling passive, but also their water use comes from rainfall (in a desert mind you) and is super-efficient. They have resources available to help you design your own anywhere in the world.
Yeah. The whole video seems kinda half-assed, and the lack of even mentioning earthships is indicative of the slapdash nature of this particular video, which does not live up to the level of quality we’ve come to expect from the channel.
@@larthallor can’t wait to see your one!
@larthallor earthships and passive house aren't really comparable. Passive house has had extensive research done on it and has been implemented much more. Earthships, although well meaning, have many problems and are not well thought out. They have no standards nor is modelling done to understand how it will perform. I discourage their use until they are properly researched and understood. Having worked on one and reading what little research there is I would avoid this style in most circumstances.
What in the elosk mun is happening here
Earth ships, while wonderful, aren’t within code through most of the USA. NM is an exception that could cloud the function of showing ‘modern’ cooling solutions.
I recently bought an old balloon framed house and stumbled across some old timer knowledge talking to my grandfather.
The balloon framing of the house allows air to circulate in the walls from the basement all the way to the attic. In the summer the hot air rises out of the roof and draws the cool air up from the basement.
It’s crazy how fast we can forget why we do things when the new and fancy arrives
Those vertical channels become pathways allowing fire to spread quickly (in the event of a house fire.) And balloon framing requires long straight studs which are no longer available.
My great grandfather constructed a home in the 80's that he designed to be self heating, cooling and all energy was generated on site with solar panels. 3 generations lived there over the years and only used the AC a handful of times. He then built a smaller version of the same style as a retirement home.
I'm jealous in a sort of positive way. I have the know-how of constructing such a home but not the means by a long shot. Good that your family benefitted of those ideas.
That's quite something, as the 80s solar panels were really inefficient. Fraction of the power generation per square meter of today's panels.
Well why didn't he help society with his genius skills? Should've built 2,000 more.
@@gladitsnotme he actually never patented the plans nor did he ever sell any rights to his books (children's story's, political science and art).
Can you put the plans online and share them?
A timely reminder that, in the context of making our lifestyles more sustainable (and making our homes and work places comfortable), there really are alternatives to "more, more, more" (electricity, air conditioning gadgets, and so forth). It was a great segment. Thanks.
Right up my alley with this. I’ve been interested in passive heating and cooling since I was in high school, so I read everything I could about it. However, trying to get anyone interested in passive hvac was crazy hard in the late 70’s early 80’s. So I did something else instead, photography. So long story short, starting in 2006 was finally able to build my dream cabin in the woods. This was in one of the coldest places in Colorado, Hartsel elevation 9650 ft. Using all the above mentioned passive heating strategies, with active solar in floor heat, super insulated- walls ceiling and floor. PV solar, and thermal solar panels. This off grid home produced its own heat, and electric. My backup heat was wood first, propane last. The electric was pV’s, and a wind turbine ( yes it blows A Lot in South Park. Just ask Cartmen;)
Congratulations on building your dream home.
@@macklinillustration , thank you. Unfortunately I don’t live in it anymore. Had to sell the cabin in the woods because of divorce. However, I learned a lot in building, community, building codes, and relationships. It’s worth it to have the experience.
A foreign friend has a townhouse with an open center core made to carry heat up and out at the roof access door/window. It works well when 1) the temp is high, but humidity is low; 2) the lower widows / doors are wide open (a security weakness); 3) the mosquito screens are clean (which is a constant maintenance item); 4) the tall house is hard on old knees. But they do have very low utility bills compared to my US home.
When I lived in San Francisco, USA most of those old Edwardian and Victorian apartment buildings had 'light wells' that were built in the centers of the buildings. Just basically holes from the ground straight up to the open sky, usually about 5 feet across, with windows that looked straight across into the opposite windows of another room in your or someone else's apartment. It seems like such a strange concept. I was told they existed to get some light into those interior rooms, and also for ventilation. I wonder if something like that would work somewhat like your description. In San Francisco the weather is pretty stable year-round, it doesn't usually get too cold or too hot. But I wonder how something like that would work in places like the US southeast or southwest France (where I now live) where winters are mild but summers can be uncomfortably hot. And in SW France air conditioning exists, but it doesn't necessarily go without saying that your home would have it. In fact it seems most people I know don't. I wonder if something like this would be a natural solution.
It's not that we stopped being clever.
Using electricity to cool ourselves is extremely clever, the issue is that we didn't really understand the consequences when we started, and have gotten used to that solution.
Most inventions don't think about consequences until it's too late. Almost every invention I can think of has unintended results, some good, others not so much.
@@amandaburnham.8817 it's true, but I think it's simply impossible to think of every outcome, we cant really treat every invention the way we treated james webb telescope where we think of every scenario ahead.
@@hmp01 so true! But we can at least try to think of as many before widespread adoption of a new technology/technique.
@@amandaburnham.8817 Agreed!
We do a lot of clever things to save energy, but most modern buildings could be WAY better
My house was built in Pittsburgh in the 1890s on a hill overlooking the river. There are crazy strong winds coming up the hillside so they built it with the front door facing the river and the back windows directly in line with the front door. So most of the time I only have to open the door and windows and I get a wonderfully cooling breeze going right through. The past few years have given us longer periods of 90+ degree days so it doesn't work as well as it used to but I can still get away with just two window a/c units that I only use on the worst days.
The same principle is used in the design of the Biltmore Estate, Asheville, North Carolina. Its construction was completed in 1892, if I am remembering correctly.
I've been lucky enough to build my own off grid semi-passive home over the last two years.
My main area is a large chamber where two of the four walls are a 40cm thick, 5% cement-stabilised rammed earth wall. Overall the wall weighs over six tonnes. The soil for it was Manually dug and filtered from 10 meters away, and was then compacted (by hand!) Into formworks. The rest of the walls/roof are heavily double insulated woodframe with steel external cladding. Above that you've got lots of solar panels on the roof to take the brunt of the heat. 100% DIY while doing my best to adhere to local building regulations.
The rammed earth right-angle wall essentially acts like a giant thermal battery. It's incredible how stable the temperature stays. In winter it remains warm, in summer it is as cool as a cave. I also have a small fireplace right in the corner of this rammed earth wall. Once lit in winter, the thermal battery absorbs LOTS of heat and the room can remain warm for days.
It's incredible how unappreciated and maligned these types of construction are....if my project was official, it would have gotten off the ground due to the fact that rammed earth is not considered an 'approved building material' in Australia. Despite its incredible strength and durability of literally thousands of years.
You said PVs catch most of the heat from above, but PVs work better when they're cool. Do you have or have you considered some method of draining the heat from them (perhaps to heat air or water) as a way of utilizing that heat while keeping the PVs cooler?
There is a community in Coral Gables, FL built in the 1890's that uses passive cooling. When I visited the outside temperature was 98F while the inside was 75F. Clever design design allows cooled air from an oversized, house surrounding porch to be drawn up through a centrally located staircase/chimney. I live in a steel building in the Nevada desert and I am modifying my home to use some of these (and other) principals. I call it "Solar Air Conditioning". I don't expect it to zero my electric bills, but expect it will be reduced.
Hi Joe, Thanks for the video!
Would be cool if you could cover some of the construction techniques in more detail?
Maybe those ancient air towers, etc.
Joe - at 3:39 "American Indians lived in caves . . ." Some time back I read about a California home builder who got a patent for building homes with flexible, earthquake tolerant joints holding concrete slab walls together, slab walls that had embedded wiring and plumbing. These homes had insulation on the outside which in turn was covered with stucco, and stucco itself can act as an insulator. Amazingly enough, living in those homes was like living in a cave, underground - cool in the summer, warm in the winter. Another group has developed "earthship homes" which are also like living in caves.
ERCOT = Egregiously Run Council of Texas
On a more serious note, after you watch this video watch the technology connections videos about minisplits/heatpumps.
watch?v=7J52mDjZzto
Not to be confused with ergot, the mould that grows on some grains and probably causes madness and witch hunts.
09:13 I love that they've actually reduced the rent of the tenants, instead of just pocketing the difference.
I live in the southern region of Brazil, and around here it only became common to have air conditioning in houses and apartments a couple of years ago (you could get air conditioning, but most people didn't bother because it rarely got too hot). Before that there was some electric heating for the winter, but mostly people would basically just dress acording to the weather
I saw a blog once with a dude who was kind of homesteading in the high desert around Northern Arizona iirc. He had a mobile home and he installed vents in the skirting and the floor. At night when it got cold he'd open the windows and the skirt vents to let the cold air in, then shut everything in the morning. When his place started warming up he'd open the floor vents and it would cool off the mobile home. I think he was using a few fans, but that's still better than an AC unit.
I'd be really curious to see an energy audit of 'a vernacular farmhouse' at a living history museum- they were also built to use passive thermal effects.
I'm in an old farmhouse with 2-foot thick stone walls, and it CAN be very efficient and comfortable thanks to thermal inertia.
First, are constructed to align with the sun so the front faces south, with a front porch that shades the front in summer but allows low winter sun to warm the house in winter. Don't forget the classic white-drapes for farmhouses to reflect light BUT allow a breeze through (in the times before screens & screen doors). The rear porch stays shady and cool.
The 'chimney effect' helps to pull cool air in from the shady side of the house and circulate it through each floor and out the attic windows.
Don't forget to open the windows at night and let cool air in to chill down the stone walls to stay comfortable.
Yeah, the problem with that is that these principles are not appicable to large scale housing for the population we currently have. And that's a problem with a lot of ancient solutions... They work really well, but not on the scale we need, so we need to learn the physical principles behind why these designs work and then figure out how to design larger structures to work with those principles.
Joe, I used your sponsor link yesterday to buy a new shaver from Henson Shaving. It hasn’t arrived yet but I did that on purpose because I needed a new shaver and I wanted to support one of my favourite TH-cam channels. I specifically went searching for a link I could use that you supplied and used your discount code. Cheers for the great videos over the years and I hope you still have the energy to continue doing what your doing.
THank you, Joe! I would love another video showing what homeowners can actually do on a small scale, on their own houses, to make them more passively energy efficient. Keep up the great educational work!
Hi--if you can find a high quality white paint made for roof painting--do it! I climbed up and painted my roof as my own mother's day present to myself.
I read the reviews on paints and paid a bit more for the good stuff. The paint doesn't chip or peel, looks nicer, and lowered our home summer temps by about 6 degrees on average--doesn't sound like much, but it was just enough to not need as much air conditioning on most days. Already paid for the cost of the paint in one summer--especially since the cost of electricity has gone way up.
I was a custodian on the University of Idaho campus. I got to see progress shut down a perfectly good cooling system. The Administration Building had a cool basement that connected to the main stairs that went straight up the center of the building. The building its self was made from stone and brick that moderated the temperature. All the offices had outside and hallway windows that could be opened so the cold basement air would be pulled up the main stairs as the rooms warmed up on hot days. Building codes changed, so even the stone and brick administration building has to have fire doors to block the old natural airflow. This made our basement custodial office too cold as the cold couldn't escape up the stairs anymore. Now the building was room air conditioners sticking out of most of the outside windows.
Everyone, report this as spam; this person is not Joe; do not fall for this scam. Note the lack of a checkmark by the circular picture. Report as spam any such spoofs you come across on any webpage.
Techniques not forgotten, but definitely being underused. A lot of farm houses in Sask older than the 40's (most of them) are self cooling via good design.
The qulliq of the Inuit is CRAZY POWERFUL! the amount of heat that gets thrown off the tiny flames is almost unbearable. It's so hot! And the blubber you eat also gets your body heat up.
I lived in Ireland for 7 years. The whole time we were there it never broke 25C. They're not that concerned about cooling. As far as hearing the older houses are small with a central fireplace.
They're more concerned about staying dry so they adopted the double wall system like the British. They only recently introduced standards for insulation so the older houses are freezing in the winter if you don't have a fire.
Everyone speaks about thick adobe walls, big porches, planting trees around the house, opening windows during the night, etc., as if it were something new. This is like reinventing the wheel. I live in a house like this, that was built around 1940 (it's even younger than the house built by my grand-grandfather, where I was raised), and still running. I have in the bedroom 25-26 °C while there is almost 40 °C outside in summertime.
I live in a passive house in central California and my family and I love it. No AC or heater use. Yes, it was more expensive up front, but our electric bill never goes over $30 and we do not have solar cells. It is wonderful to be in a cool 70 degree home when it is 109 degrees outside.
I had a house with radiant heat in the ceiling upstairs, and in the floor downstairs. It was extremely comfortable, but when those tubes start to weaken and leak, you're back to "traditional" heating, since repair cost is astronomical.
Then, another house on a lot that was previously eco friendly. The lot is FILLED with underground plastic "stuff" and the surface would be too, it it were not covered with vegetation.
At this point, I say stick with traditional, proven construction, that will last, and not pollute with new tech.
Yeah we hate plastic junk too. Still can do all the things brought up here with more natural and traditional materials easily. 👍🏽
Simple thick walls will work in most climates for both heating and cooling. 12-18" thick walls (concrete block with 2" thick insulation on both sides would work fine). THe problem is the window and door openings and where the roof attaches.
Another option is to have the structure underground. The grounds insulative properties would work well for both cooling and heating. People think they have to always go high tech, but the pueblo indians built adobe buildings that worked great both for very hot summers and medium cold winters.
Canada has had the so-called "R2000" program which started circa 1982, or forty years ago. My house is built to follow (more or less) this standard, with 24 sq meters of solar gain, foot-thick walls, air tight, a Heat Recovery Air Exchanger. Our heat, even in Canada, is quite affordable. That said, all the gadgets and gaming PCs do use a lot of power.
My 1914 Craftsman house has a "California cooler" where a vent on the floor and on the ceiling in the kitchen cabinet circulated cooler air from the foundation crawl space to the warmer attic.
great to see you uploading so frequently and with such high quality
One thing to mention is double-hung windows. They are meant to be able to be opened at the top to vent warmer air while the bottom is opened to let cooler air in. Combined with higher ceilings, they help keep things more comfortable.
Also, in dryer regions of the world, one way to cool things down is the swamp cooler. They mostly work on the principle of evaporation, in that when water evaporates it draws energy from the air to bring about the evaporation. They use 15% to 35% of the energy of an electric AC. They tend to not work as well in areas of higher humidity.
Lastly, most of the techniques for keeping the cost of heating and cooling down that Joe mentioned all involve reducing waste through conservation. A well insulated building will retain heat in the winter and stay cooler in the summer.
Using the right kind of lighting helps. We have many more options today for conserving electricity. Overall, many of our modern appliances are more efficient today. Updating to newer appliances can save a lot.
Joe if you think the Eastgate Centre is cool, Mick Pearce afterwards designed the CH2 in Melbourne, Austrlalia, and it's mindblowing; on top of using the principles from Eastgate it also has automatically moving sunshades, a passive water circulation system for air cooling, all kinds of curved ceilings and surfaces to channel airflow... I don't remember the exact numbers but its water and energy consumption were something like 15% and 25% of other average buildings, or something. Plus its air quality is phenomenal as it filters all its air from outside instead of recycling air internally. On top of that Melbourne's weather is infamously erratic, able to reach water-freezing temperatures in winter nights and up to 45ºC (113ºF) over summer days.
I lived in a heritage home built in the early 1900s and it was surprisingly cool in 104 f (40 c) temps. The walls were thick and there was a lovely porch in the shade. No air-conditioning but very comfortable.
As somebody who managed to get the job title "Building physics consultant" - I think you got most of this stuff right. NABERS is an upcoming standard from Australia with (IMO) even more promise than Passivhaus or Passive House
Btw I'm on Nebula but would rather watch videos on youtube. Nebula doesn't have a great UI and keeps signing me out of the mobile app
I'm disappointed Australia didn't come up with a confusingly similar but slightly different name like "Passive Housing".
This has always been very fascinating to me. How to use architecture and good techniques to keep a building cool.
I went to a mosque in my country, an old mosque made of stone. It was so damn nice and cool inside during summer at noon!
Since then I have been very interested in this.
8:58 Tbh... neither 28ºC or 14ºC is a comfortable temperature.
That being said, i wish all buildings thought more about that, with the global warming and energetic crysis, because of conflicts and what not, we need a paradigm shift in housing, really fast.
In my country we still love to build ginormous buildings with huge windows and mirror like covers, needless to say, as an engineer it creaps me out.
Keep up with the good work Joe, your channel is awesome.
Those temperatures are not comfortable because that is not what you are used to. It would probably be comfortable if you weren’t used to a constant 22°C.
Those are both absolutely comfortable temperatures personally
14c is fine for me but not 28c that's way to hot
For indoors? Here, we aim to have temperatures between 18 and 23ºC, the ideal being 21 - 22 °C.
But yes, overall comfortable temperatures is a subjective matter aldo dependant on the humidity and all that.
Personally, i would die if i had 28ºC inside my office/house.
This winter, I tried lowering the temps, but at 17 and with Home office - I felt miserable - my nose and feet were cold. Sleeping and doing some house chores was fine tho
I'm an HVAC tech. There is one major problem that no one talks about when 100% outside air is supplied to a building. It's filtration. Air filters plug up quickly when nothing but outside air passes through them. Filters typically need to be replaced monthly in a system like this. I see this in hospitals and laboratories. Filters are usually disposable and not biodegradable. Washable filters exist but they aren't very efficient. If everyone were to switch over to a system like this it might create a new crisis.
Or 3.... They burned stuff for heating the house and cooking. Cooking also double as a heating form.
Also.... Keep your farm animals in the ground floor and live on the second and you will feel much more warm in the winter.
Such a great onslaught of information. Really cool stuff! Literally!
8:50 slight mistake joe.
You said larger surface area absorbs less heat. This is incorrect. Large surface area will absorb more heat.
As shown in the graphic the building has small windows to absorb less heat.
Yeah, I think he might have meant that it's a larger surface area which gives off more heat, and since it's "crumpled up", there's a smaller chance that all of it faces a potential heat source at once than it if were flat.
That won't work here Scam bot.
@@rasmusn.e.m1064 nah. I think it was just a a brain fart. They happen to the best of us.
@@rossgirven5163 the context is important, because in that particular building, the larger surface area gives off more heat, as Rasmus mentioned. I think your comment was the brain fart!
@@squirlmy I think your comment was a brain fart. Joe specifically said that the larger surface area absorbs less heat. Context has nothing to do with it.
I really love all this stuff. I'm excited about that new whitest ever paint to keep my roof cool.
I love the concept of passive houses. I was going to build one but the wait list was roughly 3-4 years in my area with some local builders that support the standards of passive home building.
I want to build one as well but the few builders I know that do it only take jobs that are 1M+... yeah I need a house that's costs 350k tops. Looks like we need to raise awareness so more builders start making normal people houses to passive house standards.
@@lexpox329 ...look into ICF builders. Hit passive with relative ease, & they can reach dried-in status quicker than most techniques.
Your videos have helped me reach over $300,000 in trading by age 24! Thanks Joe Scott. Keep the videos coming. 👍🏽
Congrats ! .
I'm convinced that the big investors and analysts are trying to scare us to keep us poor and ignorant to the market.. because its steady doing good after all the jobless and market crash talks
Congrats and wishing you the best .
@kim sun When I was 21 ,but you need a finance Pro if you don’t want to loose and if you want to be more successful.
@kim sun Follow⬇️⬇️
Love, love, love!!! This video!!! Thank you so much! This IS what I need to break free from my $500+ electric bills every month ( this has literally been going on for about 4 years! My Daddy has a house that could fit about 12 of mine inside of it and he has had an electric bill of $60-$64 a month forever right up until recently when it jumped up to $100 bucks a month and now he's considering going solar. I however am stuck in Southern Illinois with an Electric Co-op that is just bending me over every month, and they never bring the Vaseline when they come with the bill!)
Yikes! I'm sorry 😞
I hang a wet towel in an open window. the (light) breeze and evaporation really helps making it feel much cooler. It's simple and relatively cheap.
The "passivhaus" joke got me so good I missed all the subsequent information about the two companies because I was still laughing.
Well done Joe.
When I was growing up in Florida in the 1970s it was still common for homes to have jalousie windows. They're less common today because they're poorly insulated, but we didn't have AC and never had a problem because the home was a natural breezeway.
And almost impossible to secure so they are an invitation to having your house broken into.
@@annieoakley9207 true, but any home is easily breached.
We just replaced our old heat pump/AC with geothermal and I wish we had done it years ago. It's extremely efficient and very quiet.
Geothermal is the dream! It's very rare though, I've never seen it person and only met one home owner who has done it
@@shayanthis the one they did for us was a 360 foot well to access the ground water for a stable temperature and trenched it in to the same place our old outside unit was. Now there's no more big noisy outside piece. 😊
Here in Dominican I've found that with all sun we get, covering the roof with solar panels provides enough shade to it to keep it fresh enough that it needs minimal air conditioning. Here just fans won't work due to the high humidity and you'd end up swamped real quick.
I’m always working on passive cooling and electricity saving projects. Some of the most simple and effective concepts are being overlooked. The power companies don’t like that my bill is negative dollars and added a $30 fee.
You page has no videos; feel free to upload to share your insights and discoveries!
My electric bill isn't quite as low because I sleep in a hammock but am open to ideas for wintering
Take a nap in the shade when hottest part of the say, plant grapes and make a grape vines and leaves grow overhead into a big patio roof
We need to go back to having more porches. That ,and the roof overhangs, did so much to keep the skin of a building out of the sun. In our old circa 1886 house we had a very old furnace. It made the house feel far warmer in the winter then the 90% efficient furnace we replaced it with did and it was so simply built that in the summer, we could go down to the basement and just turn on the fan portion manually and blow the cool basement air upstairs. Sometimes, we shoot ourselves in the foot when we get too fancy.
Yeah we need to be using the cool air in the basement in the summer...I agree the solutions can be super simple.
Joe, thanks for the distinction between PHI and PHIUS standards. How about a video on how a community, say a city block, with it's own microgrid (DC) populated with passive homes, all with PV and storage, could be the core component in the design of the future electrical grid .
Yeah wasn’t there a neighborhood there that formed their own solar group? Or something
On igloos: it's not just that snow retains heat better than ice does; it's also much, much harder to cut and shape ice than snow. You can see from the video clip you showed that the snow blocks an igloo is being built from are quite easy to shape with a trowel (or something like that). Nothing like that would be possible with ice.
great video and I hope passive homes become more common before it's too late.
My house has a cement slab set about 18 inches below ground and the lower level of the house can be 30 degrees less than the outside air. Even with no heating or cooling it stays between 50-80 degrees when the outside can be 15-106. I have been using resistive heaters in the bedrooms and a wood stove in the main room which I will replace with a mini split sometime this year. My upstairs level is pretty much whatever temperature the outside is, so when it's warm I open the windows. Most of the roof is shaded by trees, but I may still add an attic fan to blow hot air out of the attic before it can radiate down into the house.
When I was a kid in West Texas we didn't have AC, but we did have a swamp cooler on the roof that cools the air by evaporation. It trickles water across a porous surface and then blows air through it which can cool the air 25-30 degrees if the humidity is low enough. It probably wouldn't work in the east when the humidity is high though.
Where I live the electricity really never goes off unless there is a windstorm in the winter that knocks down trees, which is why I have a wood stove, but I added a storage battery to plug the refrigerator and a few other things if there was an issue
I live in vietnam, and our apartment stays relatively cool due to strong breezes. I suppose i could sleep at night with the windows open but noise and pollution make it nearly impossible.
Any chance that would be a good place for an American to move to?
Yep!
I actually build passive homes! I work for a company called Phoenix Haus in Colorado. We're combining green passive housing with offsite construction. The science of it all is above my pay grade but I'm actually on the ground building houses in a state of the art shop. Basically the house is broken down into dozens of "panels" built offsite and then shipped and assembled on site in a matter of weeks or even days. Each wall is over a foot thick and roofs can be over 2'. Everything is over engineered to hell and insulated to an extreme. It's cool being a part of an up and coming company and feeling like I'm on the cutting edge of technology when it comes to construction. Couldn't help but share
IT would be interesting to see how you can retrofit existing builds in cities (those from the 19th century for example) to use passive house elements.
There are a set of standards called Enerphit from the passivhaus institute that give guidance to make retrofits as close to passive as possible. Might be of interest.
Also there is a program called Energisprong that is doing this in EU and now in NYC. They take 3D laser images of a building and build perfect exterior covers that are airtight, add insulation values and contain the triple panels windows. They “snap” into place perfectly and can the work can be done in just a few days without anyone having to move out of their homes. We can be clever!!
Love your channel. I just installed a hybrid heat pump water heater last weekend simple reasonably cheap way to use less electricity that saves money over the long run
Short answer: The vast majority of the population lived miserably for millennia. For those who had money, there were clever workarounds.
When it became possible for me to own a home, I had been renting near my employment close to the seacoast in Southern California. I went to lengths to find an affordable way to live in this same area because I realized the temperature modulating effects of the Pacific Ocean's proximity. So had the Spanish before this area became part of the U.S. Thick Adobe earth filled walls, kept the night coolness throughout most of the day, in summer and stayed near those earth temperatures warmed by the winter sun. Shaded cloisters and the open passageways to the mild ocean breezes aided comfort. While the place I bought didn't have those attributes I did not use the window AC I bought at the same time for nearly 30 years because of the thicker plaster walls holding more night coolness under the wide eaves it has. I use selective shading to help keep my heating bill down and a deciduous tree shades the front in summer, but drops its leaves in winter, providing more sun heating or less appropriate to the season. But it is the "shortest thermometer in the nation" we have here, according to the Chamber of Commerce ads from decades ago that gives my modest home its lower comfort energy costs.
Joe made a naturally cooling house! CUZ JOE IS ONE OF THE COOLEST DUDE 😎. Sorry Joe.
Agreed!
scientists could lower temperatures to below absolute zero by putting him in a freezer
My office is too hot in the winter and too cold in the summer. When the office is so cold in the summer you have to wear two sweaters and run a heater. My apartment is comfortable in the summer and drafty in the winter. We also have storms knock over trees and had no power for 24 hours, only days later get hit by record breaking heat which overloaded the grid and lost power again. I love the idea of alternative housing. Castles in Ireland made of stone are cold all year round.
No design flaw can't be overcome with an excessive application of fossil fuels... The motto for much of the last 100 years.
I am a HVAC technician in Sacramento. This video is very interesting to me. I love seeing how we are trying to live more efficiently.
For appliance power users like me, I'm curious as how these passive structures would handle heat generating tech like server farms, or even a small scale room to handle a modern gaming rig which can often consistently output 100-300W with the monitor and tower.
I live in an old stone house, it keep cool in summer, but is hard to heat in the winter. The only way it gets warm is if the multifuel stoves are used - then the walls hold the heat for a while (but the kind of heat generated by an oil filled radiator does nothing at all to heat up the walls).
The FED has lost it and the sad fact is it's pretty obvious we are headed for hyperinflation.i think stores better have tight security because when people can't afford to feed their families, things might get ugly
Just to put some perspective on costs: my electricity bill is currently around $2000/y. I use basically no electricity, though we've used a bit more this Winter because we're both working from home and my other half doesn't like my option of using lots of blankets to stay warm.
If we were to spend $10,000 to replace the thin single-glazed windows in our place with double-glazed windows, that would cut maybe $500 off our electricity bill. The simplistic payback period for that project would be around 20 years.
If we were to spend $2000 replacing our off-peak resistive electric hot water with off-peak heat pump hot water, that would reduce our electricity bill by about $500/y, giving an effective payback period of around four years.
We keep our energy use low by only having one or two lights on, mostly reading or watching movies for entertainment, and most importantly dressing warmer or cooler for the prevailing conditions rather than cranking up the heat pump. During summer we'll cool down to 23C, during winter we'll heat to 16C (and wear warm clothes or live under blankets). $50 for a "blanket hoodie" is far cheaper than $100/year for heating.
Passive Housing is a great idea, but for established homes there are many options to reducing energy consumption which basically boil down to dressing appropriately for the prevailing conditions rather than using energy to make the house comfortable for suit-wearers.
Great job! Many folks aren’t willing to pay attention and make the same decisions you make everyday though. Where do you live BTW. Some climates just get less comfortable too.
Well done though!
@@mrkozz1 I live in Canberra, which is an inland city that tends to be cool and dry, max summer around 35C, min winter around -5C, I'm told average humidity over the year is 67% if that means anything. Also typical Australian construction is brick veneer homes (brick exterior walls, plasterboard interior) and architects/builders here are clueless about airflow, airtightness, or applying insulation correctly. I doubt any house built in Australia would pass occupancy inspection in Canada for example.
A self-cooling home in a location that is already naturally cool. Wow. So innovative.
yep that's what i thought as well. You can't do these kinds of homes in a place that is really hot in the summer, and decently cold in the winters.
That was my first thought too. How well would this do in the Eastern US in July when it's 110+ degrees fahrenheit out with 100% humidity.
@@smokeeish77 ...look up Arcosante in AZ. Thermal dynamics work.
@@Krazie-Ivan they work up to a point.
@@Krazie-Ivan bro, those are science fiction buildings ... build a normal home, for normal people in the desert using only thermal dynamics, as you say.
Oh you should check the old traditional Houses in South Syria (ancient techniques) that literally work! My grandparents house used to feel like always air-conditioned
We should have always done this. Just another intelligent design cast aside to disposable housing that constantly needs excessive repairs, because that keeps a constant supply of work for construction. Wouldn't want everyone to be able to live freely without working non-stop like a proper society. Capitalism will never let us rest. Ever.
My wife and I lived on our sailboat in the tropics / Caribbean for over ten years. We had no air conditioning. We had a large shade over most of the boat when in port or at anchor. Left all hatches and ports open as insects were for the most part not an issue. We usually had a good sea breeze and were rarely uncomfortable. Also, quite frankly, you do get use to it. When I was a child, I was raised in Ft Lauderdale Fl. This was even hotter than the Caribbean. We did not have air conditioning. The house was built with good flow through ventilation lots of windows. Again, we were use to it.
modern passive houses are are a nightmare for firefighter too, because its airtight and you can't really open the doors without then getting a backdraft (fresh air rushes into a still active fire) - so its hard to really save those houses then.
At least that is what i got told by a coworker who is a voluntary firefighter (which is pretty common at least here in Germany)
But ICF houses don't burn easily. You can hit them with a flamethrower and they won't burn. The occupants have plenty of time to exit before their furniture catches ablaze.
THank you JOe for this! I am an architect, and I've been designing energy efficient houses for over a decaede. Nothing fancy, by the way, just smart design. I live in a place similar to NW Texas (in terms of climate) and my own house only needs AC for about 10 days in the summer.
Video a bit redundant as the video is filmed in Ireland as if cooling was ever an issue in a country that cold, wet, and miserable
Well, if you add an eagle on a cactus to the irish flag you get Mexico, which IS hot! So there you have it!
@@Avocado740 so what you’re saying…is that…that the Irish are equivalent to European Mexicans
@@yoface938 Exxxactly!
Still my favorite channel. Interesting that you and Everyday Astronaut are my faves.
One thing made me grimace a little with the passive house spec was the airtight part - my first thought was "what about Radon?"
My drafty house saved me from a bad carbon monoxide problem with a bad gas furnace. I would never live in a cooler-like air-tight house and have any gas appliance.
Radon is easily addressed with a proper foundation layer & drainage system... which should already be present to prevent ground water wicking up into a slab, or pooling humidity under a floating floor system.
If a building has gas (which imo is a bad choice already), it should also have carbon monoxide alarms. Poor reason to have inefficient structures.
Hey! I'm from the green fields and cloudy skies of Ireland! The houses that are built here are well insulated. They trap heat from the sun during the day and then release that heat overnight, through the walls and ceilings. So that you can stay warm and sleep well. Because ya know heat rises. Same reason why traditionally every home has a fireplace because heat will rise through the floorboards to bedroom. However, times have changed and now the fireplaces are being replaced by central heating system. Alright Goodluck! 🇮🇪 😀 😊
I lived in Sicily, Italy for a few years as a kid, and it got hot in the summer. Really hot. But I don't remember it being stuffy in the house, like it is in Wisconsin. Our building (and all the other buildings I know of) did not have A/C. It just wasn't a thing that was installed. Heaters were, but not A/C, and we managed. The cool tile floor helped, along with the cement walls. Also, people stopped working during the hottest parts of the day & went home.
This whole thing is really cool but I will say at 8:59, 28 C is extremely hot for inside a building still. They definitely would still need some sort of air conditioning.
Passive houses I hot climates can maintain way better comfort levels today.
In fairness, Harare Zimbabwe's temperature range is only between 84 °F (the average high in October) and 45 °F (the average low in July). A tarp could nearly provide the same "cooling" as described. If I lived there, I don't think I'd spend any money on air conditioning.
I did that - instead of putting some piping down for a heat pump, I put the whole house down in the ground. The ground moderates the temperature so it cannot freeze, and you don't need air cooling. It is 10 x 30 and made of steel and is nice and quiet.
Ants and termites have been doing it for millions of years. There is in Spain a terracota container called "botijo" which keeps water cool for long hours. Earth ships use a similar principle to stay cool and off-the-grid
I’m originally from East TN and now live in lush, humid coastal Ecuador and I don’t have ac. Most of the homes here don’t. Where I live is very open compared to similarly-sized houses in the US and there’s a tile floor. The more traditional houses here are built with cane and bamboo and wood, and I find them to be comfortable, again very openly built. And I was always someone who loved air conditioning, I’ve just sorta acclimated. Take 2 cold showers a day (no hot water, not really needed)
The gravity driven electric generation sounds like something that would have ben used before electrically. Like cooling your shack in death valley.
It was at least 50 degrees cooler just because the miners built a carport
About 10 feet higher over their shack...giving shade
And cooling the house.