4 ms·
First generation immigrant, came over at age 13. It works both ways. Living in a North American style house, you get used to the lightweight doors, the total
by MarkusWandel 5y ago
First generation immigrant, came over at age 13.
It works both ways. Living in a North American style house, you get used to the lightweight doors, the total lack of sound insulation, the crank casement windows and such. Then you visit Germany, and everything is so solid. Windows and doors are airtight, with single gaskets on the door and up to triple on the window. Fresh air? Any true German will only sleep with the windows open. But teenager in the next bedroom over playing the stereo until 3am? No problem, the sound insulation is so good you hardly hear it. And everything is finished with such good materials and maintained so well. Envy envy, what ridiculous hovels we live in back home.
Even stick construction - and they do that in Germany too - is finished to the same standard, with obsessive levels of sound insulation inside the walls and such.
Someone mentioned thermal insulation though. Modern North American stick houses, while not airtight inside, certainly have an airtight envelope, and with 6" studs have a brick house beat hollow as far as thermal efficiency. In fact, the first thing we noticed when we immigrated, living in an old stick type house, was how toasty warm it was in the brutal winter cold.
- jacquesm 5y agoI've visited an energy efficiency model home in Northern Ontario that was heated by body heat and sunlight. It was called a passive house because there was no active source of heat inside the house. Double 6" walls, so a house within a house, double triple glazing. It used so little energy to stay above freezing that they demonstrated at 40 below the whole place could sustain its temperature using a single candle. Very impressive, I do wonder how in a box that airtight you're going to get rid of moisture and what they did to manage the humidity in the spaces between the three walls. The big trick that I understood they used was to make smaller vertical boxes and to use reflective foil on the outer wall side to radiate heat back in. I've googled for a bit but I can't find any online reference to this but it certainly looked very interesting and promising.
- bradlys 5y agoIn homes that are airtight, you’re supposed to have a ventilator system. It’ll flush air into the house from outside constantly. It is done in such a way that there is minimal energy loss as well (uses a fancy heat exchanger).
- jacquesm 5y agoYes, this is called a balance ventilation system where I live, but those houses did not have one of those as far as I remember, those systems require power for the fan and the whole key was that those houses did not have any active components.