alt Hacker NewsPeople still build houses like energy is cheap and abundant. A properly insulated house in any temperate climate require very little heating or cooling.
Spend 50k on insulation that will last the life of the building instead of 50k on heating and cooling devices which will need constant maintenance and replacement + fuel and end up costing 10x more over the life of the building.
A modern house with modern insulation in a mild climate shouldn't even need a central heating system. You can get by with 500w toaster heaters in each room for the coldest time of the year
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And never mind ground-source heat pumps [1] (although I know the topic was specifically solar).
I could not retrofit my house for efficient heating with $50k. To do so would likely be cheaper to completely tear it down and rebuild.
> A properly insulated house in any temperate climate require very little heating or cooling.
A "properly insulated" house still requires something around 0,5 W/m2/K. Modeling a moderate 120 m2 house in the coldest months when the temperatures hit 15-20 negative you still need 2,5 kW of heat with domestic hot water on top. Put in the efficiency of a heat pump and you are still easily looking at half a mega watt-hour per month. ~1MWh for a whole house is very reasonable number during winter months, sans electric mobility.
That's entirely unrealistic to cover with batteries with current battery technologies alone, electricity generation is absolutely REQUIRED. Windmills can help soften the blow and storage needs substantially, but the TFA is about solar, which is effectively absent during the winter.
Yes you're right and I don't disagree. But a 500w heater isn't going to cut it when it's 20F outside. You actually have to run the heat as hard as possible when the sun is shining so you have some thermal momentum going into the evening.
The end result is you're going to make big lifestyle changes to accommodate the energy. For example everyone sleeping in 1 bedroom and only cooking with an electric pressure cooker or low and slow with an induction range.
Probably because energy is cheap and abundant.
Would you be willing to quantify what "mild" means to you, maybe in terms of a USDA zone? There are maps for both US and Europe:
https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/pages/map-downloads
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USDA_hardiness_zones...
It costs a lot more than 50K to retrofit a house towards passive standards.
Not everyone has the capital (even with gov subsidies) to make those investments, and it's generally the people who need to save a few bucks on bills the most that DONT have the money.
In the short term the math is usually bad. Can be a 20, 30, 40 year payback on insulation. For the builder? It’s almost for sure a loss unless he can play the green card. For any individual owner? They are likely to leave before they recoup a project like this. Appraisals on houses are price per square foot with a bedroom and bathroom modifier. Until people start pricing in energy efficiency in homes, say a price multiple of 0.8 to 1.2 based on the efficiency of the home? It’s going to be hard to math out. Which yes is sad.