5 ms·

An interesting question springs to my mind. How does the carbon omissions of having a summer and winter house and flying between them compare to heating the sum

An interesting question springs to my mind. How does the carbon omissions of having a summer and winter house and flying between them compare to heating the summer house in winter or cooling the winter house in summer.

Gravityloss 4y ago
If you live alone and use 10 kW constantly, and an airliner uses 40 kWh per passenger per 100 km, that means per day you use 240 kWh, equivalent of 600 airplane kilometers. If your season travel is 6000 km, and you don't need any energy in the destination (since it's a paradise), it is worth it if with that you can stay there for more than 10 days. (2400 kWh). If you travel away for 3 months, you could save 90 x 240 - 2400 = 19200 kWh. If a kilowatt hour costs 10 cents, you save 2400 dollars in electricity bills and of course you pay back some (or all) of it in flights.
cinntaile 4y ago
I used [0] for the carbon calculations of a roundtrip flight. Assume 200 passengers. Flying between Stockholm and Malaga gives us 460 kg of CO2 in total. An average 150 sq meters villa uses about 12500 kWh during October-March, if I take the current CO2-intensity from [1] this gives us about 375 kg of CO2 during these months. This is excluding any calculations to cool the summer house in southern Spain. This calculation would be completely different for Germany right now, which has 10x as much CO2-intensity as the electricity region that Stockholm is a part of. That would be 3,75 tonnes of CO2 during these months. In other words, it's very country dependent. This is also ignoring any different heating modes (heat pump/gas/wood/...) between houses. [0] https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/Carbonoffset/Pages/default.aspx https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/Carbonoffset/P... [1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
yamtaddle 4y ago
You'd have to winterize the summer house really well when you left it for the winter house. And for either house you probably don't want to turn the heat/AC completely off, anyway. Modern house interiors aren't built to survive huge temperature and humidity swings. Your finishes will fall apart fast and the winter house will have serious mold problems, if you totally shut off heating and cooling.
- Gravityloss 4y ago
  We have had a summer cottage for 30 years and we let it just freeze every year. It has electricity, TV, etc. No problems whatsoever so far. Normal water pipes are drained before leaving in the fall. We leave a little bit of heat in the bathroom with most of the critical stuff like boiler, washer, toilet seat and the (well insulated) waste water pipe to the tank.

Gravityloss 4y ago

If you live alone and use 10 kW constantly, and an airliner uses 40 kWh per passenger per 100 km, that means per day you use 240 kWh, equivalent of 600 airplane kilometers. If your season travel is 6000 km, and you don't need any energy in the destination (since it's a paradise), it is worth it if with that you can stay there for more than 10 days. (2400 kWh). If you travel away for 3 months, you could save 90 x 240 - 2400 = 19200 kWh. If a kilowatt hour costs 10 cents, you save 2400 dollars in electricity bills and of course you pay back some (or all) of it in flights.

cinntaile 4y ago

I used [0] for the carbon calculations of a roundtrip flight. Assume 200 passengers. Flying between Stockholm and Malaga gives us 460 kg of CO2 in total. An average 150 sq meters villa uses about 12500 kWh during October-March, if I take the current CO2-intensity from [1] this gives us about 375 kg of CO2 during these months. This is excluding any calculations to cool the summer house in southern Spain. This calculation would be completely different for Germany right now, which has 10x as much CO2-intensity as the electricity region that Stockholm is a part of. That would be 3,75 tonnes of CO2 during these months. In other words, it's very country dependent. This is also ignoring any different heating modes (heat pump/gas/wood/...) between houses. [0] https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/Carbonoffset/Pages/default.aspx https://www.icao.int/environmental-protection/Carbonoffset/P... [1] https://app.electricitymaps.com/map https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

yamtaddle 4y ago

You'd have to winterize the summer house really well when you left it for the winter house. And for either house you probably don't want to turn the heat/AC completely off, anyway. Modern house interiors aren't built to survive huge temperature and humidity swings. Your finishes will fall apart fast and the winter house will have serious mold problems, if you totally shut off heating and cooling.

Gravityloss 4y ago
We have had a summer cottage for 30 years and we let it just freeze every year. It has electricity, TV, etc. No problems whatsoever so far. Normal water pipes are drained before leaving in the fall. We leave a little bit of heat in the bathroom with most of the critical stuff like boiler, washer, toilet seat and the (well insulated) waste water pipe to the tank.