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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Jan 20, 2023 18:52:46 GMT
I've been wondering about this energy needed for heating our homes and the coming shortage of it as the environmentalists tax it more.
Today I woke up and went outside to get the dustbin where the ground was all completely frozen up, but despite the heating being off all night the living room was 22C. This was because of three things. I had insulated the loft a bit more, I have two glass windows, the main one being south facing and it was sunny. Indeed it has been sunny many mornings in the middle of this winter with the same thing is happening. My room is working a bit like a greenhouse.
So could we like extend this process a step further and use glass to build a house, where the glass is say triple glazed and filled with argon. Glass can be ultra tough stuff if the surface is dead smooth. It's the micro fractures which weaken it. Furthermore perhaps some chemical treatment to optimise the optics would go even further in this goal. The amount of sun heat you are going to get is dependent on the surface area of the glass, so why not make the entire thing glass including the roof? In the evening you could have a huge velvet curtain to enclose it and in the bedroom you could lie on your bed watching the stars. In the daytime, assuming you were on a bit of a hill, you would get panoramic views of the great British countryside.
I know there would be a few engineering issues, but that would be a challenge and if accomplished you'd end up with an ultra-modernist construction.
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Post by nonnie2 on Jan 20, 2023 19:29:47 GMT
I've been wondering about this energy needed for heating our homes and the coming shortage of it as the environmentalists tax it more.
Today I woke up and went outside to get the dustbin where the ground was all completely frozen up, but despite the heating being off all night the living room was 22C. This was because of three things. I had insulated the loft a bit more, I have two glass windows, the main one being south facing and it was sunny. Indeed it has been sunny many mornings in the middle of this winter with the same thing is happening. My room is working a bit like a greenhouse.
So could we like extend this process a step further and use glass to build a house, where the glass is say triple glazed and filled with argon. Glass can be ultra tough stuff if the surface is dead smooth. It's the micro fractures which weaken it. Furthermore perhaps some chemical treatment to optimise the optics would go even further in this goal. The amount of sun heat you are going to get is dependent on the surface area of the glass, so why not make the entire thing glass including the roof? In the evening you could have a huge velvet curtain to enclose it and in the bedroom you could lie on your bed watching the stars. In the daytime, assuming you were on a bit of a hill, you would get panoramic views of the great British countryside.
I know there would be a few engineering issues, but that would be a challenge and if accomplished you'd end up with an ultra-modernist construction.
When designing a house, they can orientate it to get the most benefit from the sun. You scan the building plot with via a satellite gismo and the computer software shows you the best house position. Then you insulate, insulate, and insulate. Then, South facing should have the most windows, and North facing the least. Then on top of that, if you seal the house airtight, you ventilate it with controlled temperature air, called a passive house. Unfortunately, many houses didn't benefit from all of this and current building regs fails to reach poor level on insulation. |
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Post by seniorcitizen007 on Jan 22, 2023 1:19:38 GMT
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Jan 22, 2023 19:40:23 GMT
OK not bad, and plus it won an award and became a listed building.
I had a different idea in my head though. Walter Gropius claimed form follows function. If we think of the ideal form to function as an energy efficient and economical in terms of cost per cubic meter of living space we would shape it as a hemisphere. This gives you maximum volume vs surface area so it is cheaper in materials and also for insulation you would minimise surface area plus the symmetrical shape is good for the optics of the sun, so no matter where it is in the sky, the radiation gets in the same. Another advantage of curved glass is strength. An eggshell would be much weaker if it were a cube-shape. You want the water to run of it and the same with the snow.
The big question is how could you engineer such a thing. I was watching a PR film from Pilkinton glass who invented the modern method of glass sheet manufacture where they spread it out on bath of molten tin, so gravity makes it perfectly flat. If there were a way of creating the glass on site then it may well be possible to cast the whole thing as one large piece. If this were possible the construction time would be virtually nothing and all you would need is glass, which is really mostly sand and 2800C of heat. Yes I know it is a lot of energy, but you only have to cast it the once, and a solid curved piece of glass is extremely strong. Just don't reverse you car into it. I think an invention is called for.
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Post by Pacifico on Jan 23, 2023 8:06:47 GMT
How do you cool it down? - my neighbour has a house with large south facing windows and he almost died last summer in the heatwave. I just switched on the A/C...
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Jan 23, 2023 23:53:18 GMT
How do you cool it down? - my neighbour has a house with large south facing windows and he almost died last summer in the heatwave. I just switched on the A/C... You use curtains. If the sun's radiation is blocked out and it is a very good insulator then it will be cooler than the outside because the ground would be cooler. The other way is to circulate the air from the outside. Indeed you could cool it down if you had an underground heat exchanger. Another thing is that if you had a large floor made of bricks or concrete then the floor can store a huge amount of energy if on the scale of the house, so they would flatten the day and night temperatures out by storing heat in the daytime and warming the house at night. You'd want a deep layer and below that a thermal insulator. |
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Post by Dan Dare on Jan 24, 2023 11:34:11 GMT
In France houses are rated like appliances on a scale of A to G for energy efficiency. Since the RT2020 regulations came into effect new-build properties have to be rated C or better.
With effect from January 1st rental properties have to be F or better and this requirement will become more stringent every 2-3 years in future.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Jan 24, 2023 13:24:32 GMT
In France houses are rated like appliances on a scale of A to G for energy efficiency. Since the RT2020 regulations came into effect new-build properties have to be rated C or better. With effect from January 1st rental properties have to be F or better and this requirement will become more stringent every 2-3 years in future. Is that energy efficiency on rental contracts for new rental contracts or all existing ones? |
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Post by Dan Dare on Jan 24, 2023 13:57:11 GMT
New or renewed. Unfurnished rental contracts run for three years in France.
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Post by Baron von Lotsov on Jan 24, 2023 16:59:14 GMT
Ah well rental contracts can run indefinitely here. By the way, this is how you strengthen glass. www.youtube.com/watch?v=y02AXdec1sEI mentioned this earlier that you can coat the glass. The strengthening happens because atoms of a different type can be made to diffuse into the glass and plug up all the micro cracks. Without these cracks the glass would be 100 times stronger. In practice, using this method you can get a threefold increase in strength with little trouble. What I'm wondering though is if you were to build this on site, could you extrude the glass. You could make a dome by extrusion and you could have as many layers as you like. Perhaps this is what our students aught to be working on in the lab rather than doing yet another psychology degree and becoming another stupid counsellor to those who get depressed because they can't afford their rent. |
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Post by Ripley on Feb 27, 2023 18:48:39 GMT
It occurs to me that a glass house wouldn't perform well in an earthquake, and unless the glass is very thick, which would be prohibitively expensive, even tremors could crack or shatter it. I wonder about the magnifying glass effect. If the roof gets too hot, couldn't it set the curtains on fire? Perhaps some well-placed skylights would be enough?
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Post by Montegriffo on Feb 27, 2023 19:54:06 GMT
In France houses are rated like appliances on a scale of A to G for energy efficiency. Since the RT2020 regulations came into effect new-build properties have to be rated C or better. With effect from January 1st rental properties have to be F or better and this requirement will become more stringent every 2-3 years in future. Most houses in France have shutters. This keeps the heat out in the summer and helps to keep it in in the winter. I don't know why we abandoned shutters in this country. |
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Post by besoeker3 on Feb 27, 2023 20:08:15 GMT
In France houses are rated like appliances on a scale of A to G for energy efficiency. Since the RT2020 regulations came into effect new-build properties have to be rated C or better. With effect from January 1st rental properties have to be F or better and this requirement will become more stringent every 2-3 years in future. Most houses in France have shutters. This keeps the heat out in the summer and helps to keep it in in the winter. I don't know why we abandoned shutters in this country. Maybe because we got double glazing ? |
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Post by Toreador on Feb 27, 2023 20:45:10 GMT
French windows open inwards, allowing shutters to be closed and giving a better balance of temperature especially in summer.
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Post by jonksy on Feb 28, 2023 10:49:48 GMT
How do you cool it down? - my neighbour has a house with large south facing windows and he almost died last summer in the heatwave. I just switched on the A/C... This is an interesting read...
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