Needed . . . new building codes
Posted by momnature on December 4, 2007
While your Mother Nature would like to take humanity by the hand and gently point out each and every thing people should do to slow down the coming climate catastrophe, that is not how the system works. Human beings must work among themselves and find their own answers to this problem. However, as you’ve seen in my other messages, I can make a few suggestions here and there. Here’s another.
If human beings choose to live in fancy homes, enjoying warmth or cooling on demand, the least they can do is try to make sure that the energy required is minimal. They have not done so. They have set the price of their fuels so low that squandering these resources is the rule, not the exception. However, if humans factored in the true cost of these resources, and set prices accordingly, they would use them far more judiciously. Most homes leak the heating and cooling their owners pay money to generate. That is not only wasteful, it is silly. Would you spend money on expensive wine and then pour it into a glass with tiny holes in it? It doesn’t make sense to me, your Mother. But you do the very same thing when you build homes that leak your precious heating and cooling. You need to come up with building methods that stop this sort of thing.
You need to give some thought as to what goes into these large homes of yours. And, give some thought to whether large homes are actually needed. There are already far too many of you on this planet. The strain this puts on resources is severe. There is not enough resources to go around and, as I already said, your Mother Nature has more to look after than just the welfare of humans. Your present rate of consumption of finite resources can’t be maintained. You must find other ways of building your homes and try to live more simply. You must discover and use sustainable building materials and use them in such a way as to avoid wasting resources to light your homes, heat them, or cool them.
offgridguy said
The Mother is right about us needing to build our homes differently. Here’s something I did when I was building my own home. When sheeting the roof I held back about 4 inches from the peak on each side. Then I screened the gap with 1/8 aluminum mesh to keep out bugs. I installed an enamel metal roof, turning up the top edge of each panel one inch to form a water dam. You have to cut down along the seams with metal shears to create a “flap” to bend up, but it takes no time at all. Then use silicon sealant on the edges of the dam. The roof cap should be made large enough to effectively cover and also to stand above the seams to allow air to get over the dam you’ve made. This gives you the best roof ventilation you could imagine. With rafter tail venting that is required anyway, this allows fresh air into the attic space which then travels up and out the ridge vent. The attic space never gets very hot. I also had a couple of feet of insulation blown into the attic space. And, we also have good insulation in the 6 inch walls too. But I’ll tell you what, we live in one of the hottest places in California and we don’t need air conditioning at all! We get by very well using a whole house fan in the morning to bring in cool air, and we have ceiling fans in every room and turn them on when needed. Don’t mean to put A/C people out of business, but when you go this way you don’t need them.