<DrumBeat: January 30, 2009 The Oil Drum DrumBeat: January 31, 2009>

155 comments on Advice to President Obama: Grasping the Building Energy Bull by the Horns

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dohboi on January 30, 2009 - 5:34pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Do we dare to question how smart it is/was to locate gigantic cities and sprawling suburbs containing millions of people in them in the middle of deserts? Especially when people living there can't conceive of doing so without deeply cooled artificial environments and pools in every yard?

People lived in the deserts long, long before AC, just not in huge numbers.

Perhaps its time to get out of the kitchen if you can't take the heat. And the heat is going to be increasing considerably.

"can we replace tens of $Trillions worth of perfectly good structures overnight (and tear-down historic buildings as well)? I don't think so."

Agreed. That's why I mentioned retrofits. But even that is going to be a hefty bill.

There are cheaper ways to do it--spray on insulation--but it leaves a surface that people describe as like "living inside a tennis ball"--not everybody's cup o' tea. But then perhaps a tennis ball is better than an oven, a freezer, or ... a coffin?

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hugho on January 30, 2009 - 6:24pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Dohboi: living inside of a tennis ball? Never heard that one. I live in an extremely cold place and insulated my last addition with spray foam between the joists and rafters. The results were astounding. I would never insulate any other way again. R35-40 walls and floors and R60+ roofs are really amazing and comfortable and utterly silent. An unexpected bonus is that spray foam between two sheets of cladding makes for an extremely rigid massively strong panel structure.

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dohboi on January 31, 2009 - 4:22pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

As I recall, the comment was about a spray on insulation that becomes itself the new inner wall surface of the building. I think the "tennis ball" part was partly inspired because it was a small geodesic structure. I'll see if I can track down the source. Thanks for all the comments, everyone.

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alaska_ray on February 1, 2009 - 8:05am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Might want to keep an eye on those timbers that have foam sprayed on them: my engineer tells me it causes them to rot. One house he inspected at rotted every timber with foam on it by the time it was 5 years old! And that was in Fairbanks AK, which is a very dry environment (and cold! -18 here right now...going to be very hard to get those 'net zero' buildings here). I suppose you could keep the moisture out with proper vapor barrier, but it is still taking a chance. Of course there is a place here that is made of *all* foam (between Fairbanks and Anchorage), but that turned out to be a big mistake because they could never use it due to the outgassing of formaldahyde--even after 20 years it is still a problem.

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155 comments on Advice to President Obama: Grasping the Building Energy Bull by the Horns

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