Scott Adams On the Difficulty of Building a 'Green' Home 482
An anonymous reader writes "Scott Adams built himself a new house with the goal of making it as 'green' as possible, and detailed his experience for those interested in following in his missteps. Quoting: '... So the architect — and later your building engineer, too — each asks you to sign a document saying you won't sue them when beavers eat a load-bearing wall and your entire family is crushed by forest debris. You make the mistake of mentioning this arrangement to your family, and they leave you. But you are not deterred because you're saving the planet, damn it. You'll get a new family. A greener one. Your next hurdle is the local planning commission. They like to approve things that are similar to things they've approved before. To do otherwise is to risk unemployment. And the neighbors don't want to live next to a house that looks like a compost pile. But let's say, for the sake of this fascinating story, that everyone in the planning commission is heavily medicated with medical marijuana and they approve your project over the objections of all of your neighbors, except for the beavers, who are suspiciously flexible. Now you need a contractor who is willing to risk his career to build this cutting-edge structure. Good luck with that.'"
Modular (Score:5, Interesting)
They should build green modular homes and deliver them all over the country. A modular home is not a trailer. You can afix it to a permanent foundation, although in many parts of the country you shouldn't do that either.
Much of California, for example, in its infinite government insanity, will not allow you to live in a trailer even in a rural area. Why would I want to live in a trailer, praytell? Well, it'd be nice to think that the next time a nearby hill caught on fire, you could, you know... maybe at least have a fair chance of MOVING THE HOUSE OUT OF THE WAY. Instead, the county insists that you 1. Build a really expensive house and then 2. Permanently cement it to something that will eventually blowtorch it down, wash it away, or shake it apart.
Invariably, when fires occur they strip away trees and reveal more "illegal substandard housing" than anybody ever realized existed. These would be "people who had the right idea". It makes a helluva lot more sense to build a *shack* up there than anything more expensive. If you try to do that, the county will FINE YOU. IMHO, it's the county government that should be fined. If only we had a government by the people, for the people...
Where is the control experiment? (Score:4, Interesting)
Every single problem he mentions would be the same problem if he was building a "non-green" house. Lack of controls convinces him that he's suffering something out of the ordinary.
Lack of controls also tells me that after an eclipse, the reason the sun returns is that we beat tom-toms.
Re:The Perfect Is The Enemy Of The Good (Score:1, Interesting)
The problem is not that it's hard to build the *perfect* green house, it's that it's unreasonably difficult to build *any* sort of house other a concrete foundation + above-ground sticks & the same utility connections that we've had for 100 years. Any non-cosmetic variation from that building method will get you resistance from contractors, regulators, and neighbors, as Mr. Adams notes. In the last 100 years the only things we've done to improve the "greenness" of home construction is add some insulation to walls and roofs and use double-pane windows; even really simple, effective things like steel supports, sod roofs (or even steel roofs, as opposed to tar shingles), buried walls/thermal ground coupling, oversized overhangs, passive solar heating -- things that we know work and aren't even terribly expensive or new -- are very difficult to get built unless you live in the middle of nowhere and are willing to pay through the nose. And don't even consider "new" technologies like alternative energy sources or other non-standard utilities unless your neighborhood is already full of them, because the HOA will never grant you a permit for the extra equipment on your roof/lawn/etc.
Re:LEED certification and Sick Building Syndrome (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Modular (Score:4, Interesting)
I think you'd have a different perspective on trailers if you lived in the South. They're all over the place due to how cheap they are. They're meant to used on a more temporary basis but people continue to use them as their permanent homes. As a result most trailers are in poor condition and would literally fall apart if you attempted to move them. At that point they're just an eyesore and detract from everything around them (including property values)... That's the real reason they're not allowed in most cities.
Modular Homes are completely different and are meant to be used as permanent structures, hence they have no axles. Due to how controlled the factory environment is, you'll often times get a better quality modular house than you would a conventionally built one.
Styrofoam as the greener alternative? (Score:2, Interesting)
Wanna Build green? (Score:3, Interesting)
Build the whole damn house underground so that you need no AC or heating and grow native grasses over it. Problem solved.
Re:Modular (Score:1, Interesting)
The problems with trailers are that they generally decrease in value as they age as moving them becomes more difficult and expensive.
The reasons government refuse to allow their use by regular people (yes, the government is allowed to install them in most areas) is because it reduces property values and decreases the tax base. I was front line when our township banned mobile home trailers and that was the main reasoning- property taxes couldn't be relied on with them. They eventually slipped in some some minimum building requirements (like square footage and types of roofs that will inflate the footage) too in order to maintain the tax base. It really is about greed by the government. Insanity is just a given.
Re:George W Bush did (Score:3, Interesting)
The natural conclusion being that we need to stop listening to the showman and start listening to the guy with the green home and the environmentally unsound public policy?
Or stop the cognitive dissonance by looking at reality: AAG (Albert Arnold Gore, Jr) preaches pie-in-the-sky impracticality but builds an energy-sucking mansion. OTOH, GWB has the money to build an eco-friendly house yet knows that a large, industrialized society needs a continuous flow of "industrial-sized" energy.
My problem with W is that he didn't stand up to Big Oil and insist that they "play nice" by using some of their jillions in profits to spill less and have better safety equipment.
architect (Score:2, Interesting)
i am an architect and i think this guy is partly to blame but also pulling everyones leg a bit.
But the case rests with the architect. Its his job to show the cleint WHY it makes sense to NOT use natural gas etc.
Its his job to make sure the right net metering meter is installed by the elec company BEFORE the end of the build.
building green these dasy is VERY easy in reality IF you know what your doing.
In many way it is cheaper. For example.
1. walls. use a high thermal insulation monolithic wall. This lowers cost by having little labour. This also automatically air seals the building.
Hemp is good and very cheap.
you now dont need an exterior cladding or interior gypsum . thats allot of labour and material saved.
you just skim coat the exterior and interior walls with a lime wash and it looks great and will last forever.
you also saved yourself a fortune in paint. Paint is expensive BTW.
2. Use a Substructure like a portal frame construction. this takes 2 days to erect for a house, and allows you to place wall where ever you want.
you only need a post every 4 meters on the outer wall.
now you can use pad footing under these post and the rest of the floor can be raised timber. you just saved yourself a fortune in concrete and earthworks.
3. ensure you have a dedicated electrical and plumbing riser and hvac riser. This makes running all pipes and cabling dead easy. It mean the plumber and elec get in and out of their fast and so saves alot of money.
4. a properly insulated house does NOT need much heating. The active ventilation system just needs a fan coil exchangers on the supply side and that the heating for the whole house. You just saved yourself about 10,000 euros by not putting in floor heating everywhere.
5. Windows to the sunny side, and few windows everywhere else. I know this is a major design restriction, but it saves you a fortune in energy bills.
If its a hot climate make sure you have bigger eaves than normal so in summer you don't get too much. The active ventilation will dump heat outside if its required.
Homeless People Are Most Efficient (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:For all his complaints (Score:3, Interesting)
But isn't building any home not "green".
By building a new home they're creating all new materials and you're using up more land while real estate prices are the lowest they've been in 30 years.
Isn't buying an existing home sort of like recycling? You're taking something that already existed and reusing it, isn't that what recycling is?
And after you have your existing home you don't just rip everything out of it to replace it with "green" materials, you only replace what *needs* to be replaced with green products because by throwing away perfectly good drywall and toilets you're wasting and filling landfills. Sure the existing toilet might flush 3 gallons instead of 1, but what is worse, using an extra 2 gallons of water or a toilet sitting in a landfill?
Is this thinking wrong?
Re:You mean like these scientists? (Score:5, Interesting)
My friend, on page 45 of said book, Soloman states quite clearly that human beings are causing climate change.
So... what's your point again?
PS: There is a difference between science and propaganda. Epistemology is the philosophy of how you know something for certain. A person with 60 IQ points could work out that the nile is a river in egypt.
The only thing that matters (Score:3, Interesting)
The only thing that ever matters in these kinds of projects, the only thing WORTH measuring, is how long until it starts to pay for itself. Not the electrical system, or the "money saved" on your normal use, but the time until you're actually in profit on the venture as a whole.
It's a crass and crude measure but the money invested into getting something like photovoltaics, underfloor heating, etc. is directly related to the difficulty of manipulating the raw materials, the cost of extraction, the rarity, the difficulty of transporting them, installing them, the environmental impact they have (via taxes, subsidies, etc.). Marble floors, stone walls, etc. have wonderful properties but require you to move tons of stone cross-country (and even across continents). Photovoltaics contain some rare minerals, require lots of energy to manipulate, produce, dispose of and maintain, etc.
If we're talking houses then if you can't have the systems pay themselves off in less than 25 years, you're wasting your time. In 25 years, you could have bought and paid for any house you could afford, that would almost certainly sell for more than you bought it once your mortgage term is up (and thus provide overall profit even with your monthly mortgage expenditure), even despite interest accrued, ongoing maintenance and everything else - the house would "pay for itself" and any environmental damage that you incurred that wasn't directly related to its construction (i.e. I assume you bought a house that already existed, not have one constructed especially). Also, you could live in it and not have to worry about maintaining a roof garden unless you wanted to, or finding specialist contractors when your one-off heating/cooling system goes wrong.
If your super-duper green house, or your super-duper energy production system, doesn't start turning an *overall* profit in less than 25 years, you're wasting your time and actually COSTING more energy than you're saving - in planning, analysis, trips to the city to find an engineer / consultant / whatever, maintenance, replacement, time-wasting, application-lodging, construction etc.etc.etc. Although theoretically perfect solar systems can turn profits in certain parts of the world relatively quickly, this isn't true of a VAST proportion of other things that are necessary. The energy used to BUILD a new house? Hell, that's not small - and if you paid for that and then hope to get that money back by later selling the house, or on savings on unnecessary utilities, all you've done is sold your green credentials for cash on the first step anyway.
In the end, the places and people that are the greenest are NOT those putting HVAC systems in their houses at all, or even understand how a photovoltaic works. It's the people living in countries where the problems of heating, cooling, water supply, etc. were solved MILLENNIA ago and they still retain elements of that culture. Most of them are farmers. Most of them live in white-covered buildings constructed from local stone. Most of them have shutters on their windows. Most of them have land on which they can grow their own food and not have to transport food in little metal tins from foreign countries to survive. Most of them have simple solutions like wells, wood-burning stoves, their own animals and crops, houses constructed in such a way that the roof-patio is about 40 degrees C hotter than the wine cellar for most of the year. Most of them live in houses that have almost literally been maintenance-free for the last 2-3 hundred years and are likely to last at least that again.
They have electricity and televisions and, yes, they probably could generate their own but they know it's unlikely to produce any return on their investment unless they get it absolutely, perfectly correct and even then that it's "cheating" and not really being green. Hell, some of them might even have water mills on a local water source and still the investment in copper cabling, electronic safety systems, generators and electric lighting/h
Re:Which unsound policies? Worse than now? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:For all his complaints (Score:3, Interesting)
It's easy to calculate this. The people I know who built/renovated houses did calculate it. It comes out as a net gain, both for the environment and the wallet. Yay for science.
Re:no, buying a really fuel-efficient car is green (Score:3, Interesting)
Frankly both your arguments and the GPs one are ridiculous:
- say you buy your car and just after there is a new one which is 0.00001% more efficient, should you dump your car and buy the new one immediately? No!
- say there's a new car which use only 1% of the normal car, should you keep using your old car, due to the energy cost of building this new car? No!
So there is a curve (X, Y)(X is the improvement of fuel consumption and Y is the energy needed to build the car) where it becomes more interesting to switch or not,
it would be interesting to know these figures for realistic cases..
I don't know how to compute them, unfortunately!
Re:Frankly taking ANY risk is hard! (Score:3, Interesting)
This wasn't new construction so what was existing remains. The back of the house is heavily shaded by a gigantic Oak tree that stands a good 4+ stories tall. That's on the North side. South side has nothing shading it except some incidental shade from neighbor's giant Oaks to the SouthWest, West side is pretty well shaded. I have a 4 story tall Holly tree too but it's not providing shade. Most windows face South with only the upper story getting sunlight in them. Were it not for the partial shading I get from neighbor trees I'd likely have a couple of solar racks up there and will try in the future.
Perhaps not the best engineered setup but the rear of the house is cooled in Summer by the Oak and in Summer the sun isn't heating things up too much thanks to coatings and insulation. Original home was built circa 1940 BTW and it's no mansion but I enjoy it.
Re:Homeless People Are Most Efficient (Score:3, Interesting)
But that's moot. It's not really important. The quest shouldn't be to "be green", but rather to help society in some way PER "green unit". Whatever the hell a "green unit" would be. So building a house helps society, it gives someone a place to live. But building a house that doesn't need gallons of exotic water shipped from out of state every week is better, because it provides the same benefit while being greener. Likewise, if you can feed a bunch of orphans, but you have to tear down pristine rain forest to do it, then that's arguably a bad thing.
So I want to redirect the quest to be green. That one doesn't lead anywhere nice. People should try to be green when it's an option, but still try to do something good for the world.
Re:For all his complaints (Score:3, Interesting)
+1, pretty much smack-on-the-nose with the "use old techniques".
Even without electric attic fans, there is a lot that can be done for cooling with things like the outdoor trees, good ventilation, and thermal mass. Throw in an attic fan, and heating and cooling an older house is usually not a problem. (I lived in one built in 1918 in NY; it was rarely hot in the summer due to the design.)
Many old farm houses are a perfect example of this: stone walls with faulted ceilings and a couple large windows in the kitchen.
Same thing for winter time: adding thermal mass goes a long way, and things like threshed hay on the roof is significant. Tour a historic US site sometime: the buildings may be smaller, but the walls are freakishly thick! That all adds up to a warm place in the winter and a cool place in the summer.
Re:To the people modding me down - why hide? (Score:2, Interesting)
You know, if someone thought my arguments were really wrong, made no sense - they would in fact upvote my post, so that everyone could see just how "wrong" I was.
Who does that? Do you do that?
I'd say other people are downmodding you for the same reason I'd downmod you right now if I had modpoints: you just want the party you serve to be in power, but you don't care what they do with that power. And you make stuff up to support whatever you want to claim. The quoted text is a perfect example.