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You make some great points here, but I have a few nitpicks: - We do have more advanced plumbing now. A lot of new houses are being built with PEX tubing, wher

You make some great points here, but I have a few nitpicks: - We do have more advanced plumbing now. A lot of new houses are being built with PEX tubing, where the tubing is flexible and snaps together, instead of needing to be soldered or glued. - What would be better than gypsum wallboard? It's dirt-cheap, not that expensive for labor, and people like the way it looks when painted. It also has reasonable insulation value. You could have concrete walls I guess, but I think that would be a lot more expensive, plus it's pretty hard to modify wiring if it's cast in concrete. Personally I think it'd be cool to have walls that are easy to take apart so you can modify the wiring behind them without having to do drywall work and painting, but there's no easy way to do that while having the smooth, painted wall look we enjoy now. The wooden paneling thing would work here, but went out of style decades ago along with shag carpets. 48VDC power outlets? What is the value here? Higher voltage is better for lower losses; it'd be better if we moved to 220VAC like the Europeans have, simply because of lower losses. And adapting appliances would be easy. 48VDC would require completely changing everything, for no real benefit except maybe lower shock hazard. GFCI outlets have mostly solved that problem. I'm pretty sure a lot of people actually do have composting toilets these days; I don't think they're prevented by code. I've heard of people having them in basement bathrooms, so they don't need to add in expensive pump systems (as they would need to pump the toilet drain pipe's output up to the sewer level). The reason they're not more popular is because they smell (even if just a little) and require maintenance. Not many people really want to deal with that, they just want to flush their toilet and never see their poop again. What would the benefit of centralized fiber-optic building lighting be? It sounds like a lot of labor cost, to deal with the fiber (which can't be bent in tight corners). Modern LED lighting has rendered this idea completely obsolete IMO. It's simple and cheap and completely compatible with existing Edison sockets. Heck, they're even making fluorescent replacement fixtures now (LED tubes which replace fluorescent tubes), so you're not limited to Edison socket stuff either. LEDs have completely revolutionized lighting; just look at cars now. You don't need to generate light centrally when you can cheaply generate it anywhere you want with LEDs. This sounds like a pie-in-the-sky idea from the 80s. The main problem I see with building codes is the structure: wood isn't the greatest structural material for many reasons. However, there is more and more steel-frame housing being built, thanks to the lessons learned from commercial building where steel is king. Steel has huge advantages over wood: you can have much longer unsupported spans, and assembly time is shorter because the steel girders just bolt together on-site. As lumber has gotten more expensive, steel has become cost-competitive. Also, steel frames generally make for significantly thicker walls, which gives you better insulation.

logfromblammo 11y ago
That was throwing a bunch of random tech at the wall to see what sticks. But I'll play devil's advocate as best I can. PEX has been around long enough to be allowed by code. Something I will now make up on the spot, which may or may not be better or worse than any existing plumbing technology, is not: BAM ceramic, wrapped in nylon fiber and epoxy. I don't know anything about how this material would perform as plumbing, and neither does anyone else. I only suspect that it would be practically immune to clogs. How would I know how it might actually perform in real-world conditions? No one would be allowed to live in the house I plumbed it with. Gypsum wallboard might be topped by plastic or paper panels filled with phase-change materials, to help regulate the temperature of interior rooms. Some phase change materials are only about 4-7 times as expensive as crude gypsum. Sodium chloride sodium sulfate decahydrate sandwiched between HDPE sheets seems likely. You can now buy 120V AC 60Hz outlets that have built in USB-A 5V DC charging ports. Some off-grid solar-powered homes have refrigerators that use 48V DC. I know my own home is filled with AC-DC or AC-AC transformers, most of them are not very efficient, and few follow any kind of standard for their connectors. 48V is the typical voltage used for Power-over-Ethernet. The advantage is that you can use one expensive and efficient power supply to power all the electronics devices in your house instead of 50 cheap and wasteful wall warts. We couldn't upgrade US domestic voltage because we'd have to replace practically every 120V circuit breaker out there that is only rated for 120V on any given path to ground. Some municipalities require a sewer connection for any building to be fit for occupancy. Some specifically regulate the disposal of human waste. Those regulations usually predate modern composting toilets. I have read news articles where eco-hippies are threatened with eviction from their own home when they ask to have their muni water and sewer shut off because they're going off grid for the benefit of mother Earth, or something. Not my thing, but some people are into it. Fiber optic lighting can use high efficiency sulfur plasma lamps or direct solar to light interior space. The Smithsonian Museum uses it in some buildings, for a variety of reasons that don't include low cost. Direct solar fiber lighting avoids solar power conversion efficiency and heat or color rendering issues at the endpoint. Embedding optical fibers in concrete can produce translucent concrete, which has potential lighting applications, such as light-emitting countertops. The idea might actually be from the 80s; I'm not aware why it never really caught on except as a footnote on "whatever happened to the technology of the future?" type of shows that sometimes appear on the lesser-viewed niche television channels. Steel also has a notable advantage over the wood studs available in 2016. You can get steel studs of consistent quality, and all of them are rolled straight and cut square. But it took an overly long time for them to make it into the building codes, and the codes for steel-stud construction are an order of magnitude more complex than for wood 2x4s, simple due to the greater number of options available to the builder. Steel studs have gauge thicknesses, shape, nominal dimensions, alloy compositions, anti-corrosion coatings, etc., whereas wooden 2x4s or 2x6s basically have a (mostly) integer lumber grade and decades of institutional builder knowledge behind them. Can you imagine what the building industry would look like if builders adopted new structural members as readily as software pros switched languages and frameworks? Every house would be dirt cheap and look unimaginably awesome... and would unexpectedly kill 0.05% of occupants for no readily discernible reason. Builders don't need to go that far. They could adopt new tech more readily without worrying about killing anyone.

logfromblammo 11y ago

That was throwing a bunch of random tech at the wall to see what sticks. But I'll play devil's advocate as best I can. PEX has been around long enough to be allowed by code. Something I will now make up on the spot, which may or may not be better or worse than any existing plumbing technology, is not: BAM ceramic, wrapped in nylon fiber and epoxy. I don't know anything about how this material would perform as plumbing, and neither does anyone else. I only suspect that it would be practically immune to clogs. How would I know how it might actually perform in real-world conditions? No one would be allowed to live in the house I plumbed it with. Gypsum wallboard might be topped by plastic or paper panels filled with phase-change materials, to help regulate the temperature of interior rooms. Some phase change materials are only about 4-7 times as expensive as crude gypsum. Sodium chloride sodium sulfate decahydrate sandwiched between HDPE sheets seems likely. You can now buy 120V AC 60Hz outlets that have built in USB-A 5V DC charging ports. Some off-grid solar-powered homes have refrigerators that use 48V DC. I know my own home is filled with AC-DC or AC-AC transformers, most of them are not very efficient, and few follow any kind of standard for their connectors. 48V is the typical voltage used for Power-over-Ethernet. The advantage is that you can use one expensive and efficient power supply to power all the electronics devices in your house instead of 50 cheap and wasteful wall warts. We couldn't upgrade US domestic voltage because we'd have to replace practically every 120V circuit breaker out there that is only rated for 120V on any given path to ground. Some municipalities require a sewer connection for any building to be fit for occupancy. Some specifically regulate the disposal of human waste. Those regulations usually predate modern composting toilets. I have read news articles where eco-hippies are threatened with eviction from their own home when they ask to have their muni water and sewer shut off because they're going off grid for the benefit of mother Earth, or something. Not my thing, but some people are into it. Fiber optic lighting can use high efficiency sulfur plasma lamps or direct solar to light interior space. The Smithsonian Museum uses it in some buildings, for a variety of reasons that don't include low cost. Direct solar fiber lighting avoids solar power conversion efficiency and heat or color rendering issues at the endpoint. Embedding optical fibers in concrete can produce translucent concrete, which has potential lighting applications, such as light-emitting countertops. The idea might actually be from the 80s; I'm not aware why it never really caught on except as a footnote on "whatever happened to the technology of the future?" type of shows that sometimes appear on the lesser-viewed niche television channels. Steel also has a notable advantage over the wood studs available in 2016. You can get steel studs of consistent quality, and all of them are rolled straight and cut square. But it took an overly long time for them to make it into the building codes, and the codes for steel-stud construction are an order of magnitude more complex than for wood 2x4s, simple due to the greater number of options available to the builder. Steel studs have gauge thicknesses, shape, nominal dimensions, alloy compositions, anti-corrosion coatings, etc., whereas wooden 2x4s or 2x6s basically have a (mostly) integer lumber grade and decades of institutional builder knowledge behind them. Can you imagine what the building industry would look like if builders adopted new structural members as readily as software pros switched languages and frameworks? Every house would be dirt cheap and look unimaginably awesome... and would unexpectedly kill 0.05% of occupants for no readily discernible reason. Builders don't need to go that far. They could adopt new tech more readily without worrying about killing anyone.