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ive considered doing something kind of like this but just grow enough food for myself -- so a garden rather than a farm. the draw for me is reducing my living e

ive considered doing something kind of like this but just grow enough food for myself -- so a garden rather than a farm. the draw for me is reducing my living expenses. modern houses make absolutely no sense because their design carries vestigial baggage from thousands of years ago, from a time when we didnt know about any of the physics or technology that we know about now. it turns out that you can build a passive and maintenance free house for about the same amount of money as a traditional house. someone else commented about the fact that modern suburban life is a hell-scape. i couldnt agree more. people think you have to do it in order to live. but you dont, just buy land on the outskirts of the city and build a house on it. the city is right there if you want it. i dont want it most of the time, personally. but sometimes i really do. there are also people in here who say how they know farming, the grew up on a farm and its horrible. i really think that there is a new trend on the horizon of people moving away from the city, but this article misses the whole point. they wont be farming, because farming does suck. theyll just be making their lives more secure and cheaper by owning land and a house instead of renting. this will continue to make more and more sense as solar power and electric cars and self driving cars become more and more reliable and cheap. i really do think we will see more and more people opting for city outskirts.

hammock 9y ago
>their design carries vestigial baggage from thousands of years ago, from a time when we didnt know about any of the physics or technology that we know about now. it turns out that you can build a passive and maintenance free house for about the same amount of money as a traditional house. Can you expand on this? What are the vestiges in a modern house? How does one design a passive and maintenance-free house?
- wheresmyusern 9y ago
  sure. houses are made of wood. we recently had some super bad fires here in california and right now people are literally building new wooden homes upon the ashes of their last homes. does that make sense to you? in hurricane areas, people do the same thing in the absence of regulations -- they build out of sticks. roofs are often tiled with tar or slate or ceramic. why? they break, leak, and need to be replaced frequently except for slate. they get damaged super easily. the most common roofing material by far is asphalt shingles where i live. they get extraordinarily hot when the sun beats down on them, and since they are attached directly to the house they make the house get hot. there is also energy management. most houses leak air because traditional construction does nothing to ensure the air tightness of a house. back in the old times, it would have been a huge undertaking so nobody bothered with it. most houses only put insulation around the wooden members of the walls, so heat is conducted through the wood, going right around the insulation. concrete foundations werent insulated until recently. the ventilation systems in houses just throw energy out the window, heating or cooling the air in the house and then throwing it out and bringing off-temperature air in and then heating or cooling that and then throwing it out and so on. there are lots of other things that dont make much sense. there is a new wave of house building called passive house building. it basically takes into account all of the things i mentioned, fixing them. my personal plan for a "passive house" is to use icf construction. icf or "insulated concrete forms" is a building technique thats used in florida for homes that need to withstand hurricanes. you can see photos of desolated landscapes post-hurricane where the only standing structure in sight is a single icf home. icf gets its name from the fact that it is pre-insulated. you get a bunch of expanded poly-styrene blocks that click into place to form a single monolithic mold into which concrete is poured. the forms also have integrated clips and hangers for rebar reinforcement. you can also use micro-rebar to make the concrete unbelievably strong -- the military uses micro rebar to make blast-proof structures. the result of icf construction is a completely monolithic, air tight, high thermal mass, super highly insulated structure that has no significant thermal bridges depending on the implementation. its simple, effective and isnt much more expensive than a traditional system let alone a wooden system that meets the same specifications. icf houses with cementatious stucko wont burn and is considered a non combustable structure by the government. the air ventilation system, which is essential in an air tight house, will be what is called a heat recovery ventilation system. it uses heat exchangers to transfer the heat or lack of heat in the outgoing air into the income air. it isnt expensive or complicated, its literally a bunch of tubes that touch eachother. that simple arrangement will retain 95% of the energy you expend heating or cooling the house even while the ventilation system is working at full tilt keeping the air inside the home fresh and free of humidity. the outside of the house can be covered in cementatious stucko as normal, but stucko with integrated pigment so that it doesnt need to be painted, ever. maybe power washed every once in a while. a thick and highly insulated concrete slab on grade foundation provides lots of thermal mass to store heat energy and also prevents energy leakage. the roof can be a raised seam metal roof. these roofs last a minimum of 40 years and can take hail and whatever else is thrown at them. you see them (in america) on commercial buildings because every business that runs the numbers comes to the same conclusion: metal roofs are durable and free of nonsense. if you do a metal roof right it can last longer than you. they also reflect heat instead of absorb it so they keep things much cooler. the house will also have triple paned windows with an acceptable R and U value. thats another things houses do wrong. thats the basic overview but there are lots of other things and lots of other details that have gone into it. overall the cost is a little higher but not only do you make up for it in the long term, you buy something that is worth way more than all the extra money: piece of mind. living in a house that takes care of you, that doesnt have problems or demand money.
  - hammock 9y ago
    That sounds awesome. The only thing I could think of while reading it was how impossible it would be to convince a secondhand buyer of all that though. Resale value not worth the upfront investment. However if I planned to own that house until I died (or longer) might be worth it.

hammock 9y ago

>their design carries vestigial baggage from thousands of years ago, from a time when we didnt know about any of the physics or technology that we know about now. it turns out that you can build a passive and maintenance free house for about the same amount of money as a traditional house. Can you expand on this? What are the vestiges in a modern house? How does one design a passive and maintenance-free house?

wheresmyusern 9y ago
sure. houses are made of wood. we recently had some super bad fires here in california and right now people are literally building new wooden homes upon the ashes of their last homes. does that make sense to you? in hurricane areas, people do the same thing in the absence of regulations -- they build out of sticks. roofs are often tiled with tar or slate or ceramic. why? they break, leak, and need to be replaced frequently except for slate. they get damaged super easily. the most common roofing material by far is asphalt shingles where i live. they get extraordinarily hot when the sun beats down on them, and since they are attached directly to the house they make the house get hot. there is also energy management. most houses leak air because traditional construction does nothing to ensure the air tightness of a house. back in the old times, it would have been a huge undertaking so nobody bothered with it. most houses only put insulation around the wooden members of the walls, so heat is conducted through the wood, going right around the insulation. concrete foundations werent insulated until recently. the ventilation systems in houses just throw energy out the window, heating or cooling the air in the house and then throwing it out and bringing off-temperature air in and then heating or cooling that and then throwing it out and so on. there are lots of other things that dont make much sense. there is a new wave of house building called passive house building. it basically takes into account all of the things i mentioned, fixing them. my personal plan for a "passive house" is to use icf construction. icf or "insulated concrete forms" is a building technique thats used in florida for homes that need to withstand hurricanes. you can see photos of desolated landscapes post-hurricane where the only standing structure in sight is a single icf home. icf gets its name from the fact that it is pre-insulated. you get a bunch of expanded poly-styrene blocks that click into place to form a single monolithic mold into which concrete is poured. the forms also have integrated clips and hangers for rebar reinforcement. you can also use micro-rebar to make the concrete unbelievably strong -- the military uses micro rebar to make blast-proof structures. the result of icf construction is a completely monolithic, air tight, high thermal mass, super highly insulated structure that has no significant thermal bridges depending on the implementation. its simple, effective and isnt much more expensive than a traditional system let alone a wooden system that meets the same specifications. icf houses with cementatious stucko wont burn and is considered a non combustable structure by the government. the air ventilation system, which is essential in an air tight house, will be what is called a heat recovery ventilation system. it uses heat exchangers to transfer the heat or lack of heat in the outgoing air into the income air. it isnt expensive or complicated, its literally a bunch of tubes that touch eachother. that simple arrangement will retain 95% of the energy you expend heating or cooling the house even while the ventilation system is working at full tilt keeping the air inside the home fresh and free of humidity. the outside of the house can be covered in cementatious stucko as normal, but stucko with integrated pigment so that it doesnt need to be painted, ever. maybe power washed every once in a while. a thick and highly insulated concrete slab on grade foundation provides lots of thermal mass to store heat energy and also prevents energy leakage. the roof can be a raised seam metal roof. these roofs last a minimum of 40 years and can take hail and whatever else is thrown at them. you see them (in america) on commercial buildings because every business that runs the numbers comes to the same conclusion: metal roofs are durable and free of nonsense. if you do a metal roof right it can last longer than you. they also reflect heat instead of absorb it so they keep things much cooler. the house will also have triple paned windows with an acceptable R and U value. thats another things houses do wrong. thats the basic overview but there are lots of other things and lots of other details that have gone into it. overall the cost is a little higher but not only do you make up for it in the long term, you buy something that is worth way more than all the extra money: piece of mind. living in a house that takes care of you, that doesnt have problems or demand money.
- hammock 9y ago
  That sounds awesome. The only thing I could think of while reading it was how impossible it would be to convince a secondhand buyer of all that though. Resale value not worth the upfront investment. However if I planned to own that house until I died (or longer) might be worth it.